

Ask HN: Does your team use an internal wiki? - BadassFractal

Hello HN,<p>I was wondering if any of you had experience with setting up and running an internal wiki as a team knowledge repository.<p>My team right now uses OneNote to store all of our tribal knowledge in, It's however recently become quite inconvenient, as many of us are moving to either Linux or Macs. Bonus points if it uses a popular syntax such as Markdown. Even more extra points if you can edit the content through a good text editor like vim.<p>Thanks!
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gvb
We use Redmine[1], which has a wiki plus a whole lot more. We use the "issues"
feature heavily as well as the wiki feature.

The non-technical staff use the repository browsing a lot - the engineers use
SVN/git direct access... the non-technical staff only needs browsing access so
Redmine covers that.

In the past, I've used Trac[2] as well. Redmine is heavily influenced by Trac,
but at the time I made the choice for our company, Redmine supported multiple
project a _whole_ lot better.

In the more distant past, we used Twiki[3], which is wiki-only. It has a lot
of functionality and is a nice wiki (I still like its markup best).

Twiki is very nice in that it keeps its pages as text in a repository (RCS
when I used it, probably still). One thing that bothers me about
Redmine/Trac/MediaWiki is that the pages are in a database so, if you have a
problem with your Wiki, you have a _very_ hard time getting your notes out of
the wiki to see how you fixed it last time. :-/

A different engineering group at a former employer used MediaWiki[4] which
obviously is a very competent wiki as well.

[1] <http://www.redmine.org/>

[2] <http://trac.edgewall.org/>

[3] <http://twiki.org/>

[4] <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki>

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1331
We use gitit [1]. It supports a number of syntax formats, including Markdown.
It supports a number of revision control systems to use as the file store,
such as git. I very rarely use the web interface, as I prefer to use the wiki
from the command line, using vim for editing. Use of git also allows team
members to easily clone the repository and use it even without access to the
server.

Note that you can also edit text in Firefox textboxes with the editor of your
choice using the "It's All Text!" add-on [2]. I have my browser configured to
use gvim, so I can use vim to edit everything from emails and wiki content to
this HN comment. :)

[1] <http://gitit.net/> [2] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/>

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BadassFractal
Oh gosh, I've always wanted something like "It's all text", but I never
bothered looking if anything of the sort existed. This certainly removes the
need for having to store the files on disk in such a way that they're
accessible to gvim, awesome!!

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robotmay
I've used Gollum (<https://github.com/github/gollum>) which is a pretty
straight-forward little wiki and works well in a small company.

~~~
BadassFractal
I discovered that apparently Gollum isn't very well supported on Windows
(might be more specific to actually), but at least you can view the end-
product in GitHub, if you can't run the server.

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macca321
It can be very hard to get started with a wiki - content either isn't added,
or isn't up to date, so people lose trust in the info in there. This has a
negative feedback effect on people writing entries too. In addition, writing
articles is hard as people feel expected (perhaps from wikipedia) to having to
write detailed, canonical articles.

I have had success numerous times introducing an internal blog as a team
knowledge repository, blogging anything interesting to it. With a search
function, and making anyone an editor, it has many of the same features with a
number of benefits:

\- people can comment and ask questions

\- signing up the development mailing list as an email subscriber ensures
everyone sees new info as it is posted

\- people blog about code issues, and tips and trick, not just 'how
complicated feature X works'

Honestly, it works a treat. Blogging is the mechanism by which we share
programming knowledge on the internet, why shouldn't it be the method we use
inside our workplaces?

~~~
BadassFractal
Interesting approach, thanks for sharing!

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caw
My team has an XWiki. It works well enough, and there are a number of plugins
and things to get XWiki pages to update in vim or emacs through a Perl RPC
library. I don't like it as much as Confluence (paid), but it's at least
syntactically the same. The Perl library you use for scripting is actually the
Confluence library.

Mediawiki is OK, but the granularity of access control isn't there for what
you could need in the software world.

The corporate overlords use Sharepoint, and also some Confluence. If you host
all your OneNotes online, you can have OneNote sync them. That might be your
quickest way to share your tribal knowledge. This is an obviously short term
fix because otherwise every new employee will have to add N synchronized
OneNotes. I haven't found a way to import a OneNote into XWiki short of
printing to PDF and importing again.

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factorialboy
Yep, we have a GitHub repo and use its Wiki quite a bit. (Along with shared
Google Docs)

~~~
BadassFractal
I actually just realized that you can clone the wiki hosted for each repo in
Git onto your disk and just edit it from there rather than having to do
everything through the web interface. I think running the gollum server will
also host that wiki locally if for some reason you want to read it locally
through the browser. That's pretty neat!

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thelastknowngod
My last two jobs both used Mediawiki in different capacities. The current
company is moving from Mediawiki to Mindtouch. It is similar to Mediawiki but
more geared towards corporate environments. The editor is completely wysiwyg
as well.. no more markup which is great for the non-geeks in the company.

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aastaneh
Our team uses dokuwiki, which is much more lightweight than mediawiki and
serves our purposes quite well.

<http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki>

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Quiark
We use a wiki and it's very useful. We have even moved the project
documentation to it from SVN.

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tarr11
We've used moinmoin, which is nice.

Can't use vim.

Maybe Dropbox for teams?

