Wiki software questions

For building a community knowledge base ...

Interested in advice, tips, testimonials on which software to use and which to avoid. And free vs paid. How practical is it to start on free and upgrade later if the volume is sufficient?

Photos and images - would like to include in the knowledge base.

The possibilities of uploading existing documents from .doc, .pdf, etc. What are the possibilities of uploading an existing doc that has images imbedded, as is?

Would prefer software that does the job well and is also easy to use by people who know more about the subject than they do about software.

thanks !!

 

The most common wiki software is mediawiki. It powers the Wikipedia and similar sites. I am not a real fan of Wiki software myself. While it has a simplistic markup, its easy for people to mess up content in my opinion and it requires learning yet another markup language. They are well suited to having a couple thousand people edit pages though. Just the markup is a turnoff to me when they could have easily built it around standard HTML markup.

Are you letting users add and edit content? If your users are not technical you might look at a CMS which allows users to register and contribute content and has a WYSIWYG rich-text editor. Many WYSIWYG editors today support a paste from Word function which strips all of Microsoft Word's extraneous code. Unfortunately vBulletin doesn't support this yet. Some also strip harmful code while keep other things intact.

Depending on the number of users who will have edit capabilities, you can probably build a knowledge base in Wordpress quite easily. Use Categories to build your basic structure and taxonomy and then tags for cross-linking information. Related posts takes only a few lines of code or you can find a plugin to do it. Could actually have it up and running in a few hours. If you use Wordpress, then writers can use Windows Live Writer, Scribefire or some other desktop based editor to create new topics and submit them to your site via XML-RPC.

 

The one and only Wiki software I have ever used is indeed MediaWiki, a free Wiki software that powers Wikipedia as Wayne mentioned. I think for what you are looking to do, it will do the trick. But there might be others that are more focused for document and image uploading, though I am not certain.

 

Thanks very much for this feedback, I'll definitely follow up these ideas. I'm not sure how many users will have access to edit. I doubt it will be thousands ... but whether it is a dozen or several hundred, I'm not yet sure. Both MediaWiki and CMS/WYSIWIG sound interesting. I have some very interested leaders/editors on board.

If we start in one app and then switch later to something better suited, not only is migrating all the content, formatting and layout a pain, but the extraneous coding that applies to one and not the other could also be consideration.

In addition to mining the minds of many experts, some people have been keeping their own private knowledge bases and are interested in contributing to a central repository. It would be easiest if we can upload or copy just what they have already put time into, with images and so forth. But it is what it is, especially the formatting code translation ...

How likely do you think it is that Mediawiki will go paid someday? thx!

 

Mediawiki is distributed under the GPL. Even if they decided to start charging, someone could take the code and continue distributing it for free.

 

I also noted on the vB forum that they may have an add-on wiki in vB4. I am all about integration and one source of support.

Also saw a post from someone promoting a vB-integration-friendly wiki.

Anything to share about these leads? thank you!

 

There is no Wiki functionality in vBulletin 4.0. It is adding a CMS which allows edit in place content and pages using a WYSIWYG editor.

 

There are two paid addons for vBulletin that do wiki integration, one is is just a bridge that uses MediaWiki and bridges it with vBulletin the other is a full wiki addon for vBulletin.

I cannot for the life of me remember the of the company. However I'd be careful about buying add-ons now with vB 4.0 right around the corner who knows if they're going to be updated.

 

Yes, I would definitely wait until after vBulletin 4 goes Gold to buy any modifications for you forum.

 

It's possible to let it get started while the enthusiasm is high my creating a sub-forum and usergroup with special permissions to edit. A virtual wiki, rather the same idea as the CMS w WYSIWIG. Then do the migration thing later.

 

Make sure your users are on board with the wiki idea though; I've seen several sites where the owner added a wiki, thinking he'd get free high-quality user generated content, when in fact the members kinda thought "huh? He expects us to do this for him?"