MediaWiki still needs some love

I’ve mentioned before that my company uses MediaWiki as a platform for the intranet. this has been a huge success, but we’re still seeing some shortcomings. Namely: a lack of elegance around tabbed tables and spreadsheet-like numbers. Almost everyone in the company has contributed something to the”goat” (our nickname for the intranet), but more often than not, people still want to refer back to some excel (bleh) spreadsheet back on another fileserver.

Certainly, the mediawiki markup doesn’t handle tables very well. Ther are hacks out there to handle simple tabbed data, and convert it to a standard wiki table, but these are still ‘hacks’. Even then, there is no computational (read column sums for totals) abilities here. As such, managers still want to keep their inventory summary reports, marketing penetration reports, and general TPS reports in spreadsheets. It hurts the ‘quick communication’ that should come from a wiki– hence the name.

I think the core issue here may go deeper here. I have had numerous conversations with managers and others who try to publish on the wiki, only to see a cursory bullet list or series of abbreviations and summed numbers with no context nor explanation. The deeper issue here is that, despite all that time spent in humanities classes, I am convinced that most people do not enjoy writing. It’s easy to assume a shorthand when talking with other employees, as so much background and players in a conversation are common, and therefore “don’t need to be esplained”. This is an easy excuse to make, I fear. It deprives the reader of a proper context, and allows that reader to fill in his/her own details. No wonder specs go back and forth so many times.

For me, an important point to make between publishing on a wiki intranet and sending an email to your manager is: your manager knows almost everything you’re dealign with right now, and therefore may not need the full explanation; someone reading your wiki post may be clear on the other side of the company, or a complete newbie, or both. Without that context, the page will be of little use. Fortunately, wikis provide such easy linking that the context can be as simple as a few sentences salted with links to the entire background. Too bad so few writers see this.