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Ask Slashdot: Multimedia-Based Wiki For Learning and Business Procedures? 97

Posted by samzenpus from the a-little-help-please dept.
kyle11 writes I'm scratching my head at how to develop a decent wiki for a large organization I work in. We support multiple technologies, across multiple locations, and have ways of doing things that become exponentially convoluted. I give IT training to many of these users for a particular technology, and other people do for other stuff as well. Now, I hate wikis because everyone who did one before failed and gave them a bad name. If it starts wrong, it is doomed to failure and irrelevance.

What I'm looking for would be something like a Wiki with YouTube built in — make a playlist of videos with embedded links for certain job based tasks. And reuse and recycle those videos in other playlists of other tasks as they may be applicable. It would go beyond the actual IT we work with and would include things like, "Welcome to working in this department. Here are 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customers' systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job." I tried MediaWiki and Xwiki, and maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I can't seem to find a way to tweak them to YouTube-level simplicity for anyone to contribute to without giving up on the thing because its' a pain in the butt.

My only real requirement is that it not be cloud-based because it will contain certain sensitive information and I'd like it all to live on one virtual machine if at all possible. I can't be the only one with this problem of enabling many people to contribute and sort their knowledge without knowing how an HTML tag works, or copying files into something more complicated than a web browser. What approaches have any of you out there taken to trying to solve a similar problem?
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Ask Slashdot: Multimedia-Based Wiki For Learning and Business Procedures? More

Ask Slashdot: Multimedia-Based Wiki For Learning and Business Procedures?

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  • First.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 29, 2014 @05:10AM (#48017809)

    First one to suggest SharePoint gets shot

    • First one to suggest SharePoint gets shot

      Lol. Thanks for the warning.

  • A content problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday September 29, 2014 @05:13AM (#48017823)

    The problem with any system is content. You said all Wikis have failed so far, have you figured out why? The answer may not be in the format itself but rather the content it provides. If you can't get the content right, and most importantly relevant, then it doesn't matter what technology you will use.

    My suggestion is before you even consider doing this you need buyin from the various departments you support to help create content. If you launch with little you will be irrelevant. If you put it off long enough to fill it and make it useful then you may have a chance of surviving.

    "Build it and they will come" does not apply here.

    • Re:A content problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Monday September 29, 2014 @05:44AM (#48017915) Homepage

      What the poster wants doesn't sound like a Wiki at all.
      Unless he wants ALL other random people to add, change and update information, he would be better off using any random CMS.
      Wiki's trade content creation features for maintenance/editing features.
      Content in a Wiki is easy to change and hard to make look perfect.
      If you want perfect looking content and don't need the ability for anybody to change content in a few seconds, don't use a Wiki.

      • Re:A content problem (Score:4)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday September 29, 2014 @06:57AM (#48018097) Journal
        A wiki is a perfectly adequate CMS, if so configured, and if this is basically a vehicle for slinging video snippets at people the details of formatting are hardly going to be your biggest problem.

        The more fundamental problem is that "Content management" and "Content" are fundamentally different things, and it's not a difference of degree. There is no CMS so brilliant, even in principle, that it will produce a single line of information for you. The best you can hope for is a system that auto-magics the production of indexes, bibliographies, other organizational stuff, and doesn't munge the formatting into unreadability.

        You'd be better off with 'content' that is actually worthwhile tacked together with threadbare HTML hacked out in notepad than you would be with the finest of all possible CMSes and nothing to put in it...

    • The problem with any system is content.

      Bingo.

      Use static HTML, CSS, the F4Player [gokercebeci.com] and see the lectures catch on. Once you've got content, choose/buid you system based on that. That might even be Wordpress or Joomla or something.

      • TFA doesn't provide enough detail to know for sure; but the problem may also be with expectations about what the system can do.

        "Training" video snippets, regurgitated by various 'learning management systems' are something to be treated very carefully. Video tends to be slow and have poor information density as reference material(for, say, the arcana of some ghastly line-of-business software mess); but are also fairly shallow, and a bit condescending, as a substitute for a little hands-on guidance for you

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by kyle11 ( 1186311 )
          Not so much that as we are a large org with many quirks in each little department. I agree with spelling everything out and reading - but sometimes filling out a request form on a terrible webpage takes forever and the wrong click of doom will negate the last 10 minutes you spent on it. That's where a video would be handy. As would repeat complex issues that need you to do the right basic maintenance task, but need an advanced level of troubleshooting to know what that task might be. If you're the night

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kyle11 ( 1186311 )
      Thank you! I know I'm going to need buy-in from lots of people to get anything off the ground, but what I'm looking at I think is half wiki, half LMS, half youtube in the sense that I'm trying to build a collective intelligence so that regular people can document their every day tasks - be it technical or administrative, and just avoid wasting time finding out how to do something that can be easily explained. Whatever the "it" is I'm trying to build needs to be idiotproof for people to contribute to. If I

      • I may be being pessimistic here but I don't believe such a system actually exits. The problem is that its phenomenally difficult to write something that can do all that you want but also be simple and easy to use. A very crude solution might be a basic database to store your lookup archive with a basic lookup code on each record, and a (manual) file store using directories to store the videos. A pain in the arse to use but at least you don't get chained into a system that's pretty much guaranteed to reach a

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by kyle11 ( 1186311 )
          Thank you! I know where you're coming from. I think I'm a bit ahead of my/the company's time here. My major vision is that as technology grows faster, as we do different things, we have this social network and platform for lack of a better term. Something with tickers/feeds/updates that let people see what others are doing. Break down the silos of people in different departments having no functional knowledge of what each other do, and in turn grow that collective consciousness to something bigger. Fa

  • Atlassian Confluence? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Hi
    I am not sure a Wiki is the right thing for you: you are effectively looking for a training / knowledge sharing platorm with strong video focus.
    A the strength of a Wiki to me is its editability, which I am not sure you'll need...
    So you might want to consider looking a bit around for video based trainnig platforms?

    Anyway, if clollaboration and editing (rather than just consumption and dissemination) is of interest: my company is using Atlassian's Confluence which is easy to use and quite powerful at the sa

  • ...I suspect Confluence together with plugin CYO Create-Your-Own would do the job.

    As an extra bonus, it might, just might, allow your office documents to be reasonably integrated within the wiki (fi. search box).
    Although, I try to stray away of not open source software, I had overall good experience with Confluence a couple years ago.
    Also, Apache Software Foundation has also been relying on it for years (after all, that's how they got hacked ;-).
    Let us know how it would or would not fit your bill.

  • Look deeper (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You don't need a wiki to explain the horrendously convoluted business practices. You need to get the horrendously convoluted business practices simplified.

    I know you're in the IT department not senior management, but that does put you in something of a position of strength if you can quantify the time being wasted by the current procedures and explain how a simpler procedure could work and how much money it could save. Just be careful, you may be writing your own job description as the lucky (?!) one who ge

  • Dokuwiki if you must (Score:4, Informative)

    by Monoman ( 8745 ) on Monday September 29, 2014 @05:51AM (#48017923) Homepage

    I'm not sure using a wiki is really the answer but if you insist then try Dokuwiki. It doesn't get much simpler on the end user side when it comes to using a Wiki.
    https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuw... [dokuwiki.org]

  • "Hey new boy. Browse those manuals/videos and ask a few guys what they're doing." That's not a good approach because : (a) It's not structured (b) There are no objectives (How does new boy know what's important/frequent/tricky?) (c) There's no 'reward' for learning a skill. Chucking somebody at a wiki suffers from these issues.

    A tutorial is not the same as a reference manual. A wiki is the latter.

    If you want to teach somebody a bunch of skills you need to print out a worksheet with the skills listed i

  • Different people learn in different ways. For some watching is enough but others need to 'do'. There's a lot of work been done on the various ways. Videos are unlikely to be the whole answer. In fact they may not be suitable at all if they concentrate on click-this-click-that. The task is in the person's head and they may need careful preparation of information or mental triggers to check for odd circumstances. So the task is not 'clicking at the orders screen' but 'taking an order and making sure not
  • I totally agree with what was said above about Confluence: Confluence is a great option for a Wiki. https://www.atlassian.com/soft... [atlassian.com] And it does support different media types. Whether you actually need a Wiki is a different questions :)
  • If time is important in terms of preparation and especially maintenance, then Adobe's Robohelp product may be worth considering, probably with Captivate for producing the video material. It has its own set of wiki templates, plays well with Sharepoint, is HTML5 ready in its current version (11), and allows for production of varying formats within the same file or project. Just be ready to tweak the code for the templates.

  • Try Atlassian Confluence

    https://www.atlassian.com/soft... [atlassian.com]

    It is not free (as in beer) but IMO it meets your needs. This is the most user friendly wiki software I know and has roles for knowledge base system and also means to attach files (f.e. videos). You can put in few macros that will automagically embed attached videos in web player.

    Read on here:

    https://confluence.atlassian.c... [atlassian.com]

  • Drupal with lots of modules (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    we started 6/7 years ago with a wiki and 5 years ago moved to a drupal instalation with loads of modules.

  • it can handle course materials in all common formats: documents, audio, video, etc.

    Surprised nobody has mentioned it already.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rgbscan ( 321794 )

      Heck no. As someone forced to use Moodle by college it is hands down the crappiest e-learning platform I've ever had to deal with. Even worse than blackboard. All those other MOOC's do pretty well, and I happen to love the interface Udemy provides, but for heaven's sakes don't torture people with Moodle. The *ONLY* thing it has going for itself is that it's free.

  • There's plenty around. Here's one: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/... [mediawiki.org]

    Ignore that advice about Confluence. That product is HARD to use imo. Mediawiki is way better.

    BTW - New version of Mediawiki have a rich text editor built in. You probably want to turn that on.

  • Making knowledge explicit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ruliz Galaxor ( 568498 ) on Monday September 29, 2014 @08:02AM (#48018273)

    The number one problem with wikis and all other systems that try to 'store' employee's knowledge is that it requires people to make their knowledge explicit.

    In your daily life and in your work, many things (if not almost everything) you do is based on implicit knowledge. You implicitly know how stuff is done, but to describe the steps you take and the thought processes you have, takes a lot of time and energy of your employees/colleagues. And then of course there's also the issue of keeping the knowledge up-to-date. Adding it is one thing, but keeping it fresh and ensuring people update the explicit knowledge in the wiki, also takes time and energy. Especially in IT, because the way things work changes relatively often.

    And last but not least, people are often not willing to make their knowledge explicit, because their implicit knowledge makes them valuable as an employee. Overall you could say that the intrinsic motivation for people to make their knowledge explicit is very low.

    Many scientific papers have been written on this subject. I suggest you try to find some answers there, although they may not be easy to find.

  • We had a similar use case at my company, although the amount of actual video was very low. One thing you should consider is permissions. If you need permissions at all then a wiki is not for you, wiki's are not designed with fine grained viewing/editing permissions.
    We've had a great success with an internal Drupal CMS instead. Web developer to put the company style on it and put the first few articles in, quick training session on Drupal for managers to cascade down to their departments.

  • At work IT uses Onenote notebooks for documentation. I never tried it for video, but we've had good luck for it with text/images. No programming knowledge needed, adequate search, OCR/search of text in images. You can sync the content using a file share or Sharepoint, and probably WebDAV. I understand it's cost-free for Windows and Mac. You get a web interface if you use Sharepoint, but I don't care for it. If you're a primarily Windows/Office shop it might be worth testing.

  • Wikis let anybody add and edit data. That is there strength and their weakness. That might be good in some situations, but probably not with business policies and the like. In a business setting, maybe something like Wordpress would suit your needs better as you can imbed multimedia in it. If you have more advanced needs, then maybe Drupal would work.

  • i wrote a video upload and playback system for a christian-based financial advice organisation that was uncomfortable with the idea of having youtube advertising messages in direct contravention of the advice that they were giving their clients.

    the "normal" way to do what you are asking would be to simply have a plugin that allows you to specify the youtube URL, and it would be embedded... this is not very hard to do, and, if there is not something out there already, consider paying a programmer to do it.

  • We are testing deploying Dozuki at work. It's the software used to create iFixit manuals and is built around Open Manual http://omanual.org./ [omanual.org.] Can't say if I would recommend it at this point but the Open Manual standard looks interesting.

  • Videos... (Score:3)

    by Dr. Evil ( 3501 ) on Monday September 29, 2014 @10:00AM (#48018917)

    "Here are 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customers' systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job"

    Access request procedures change very fast and are tedious to contribute updates to.

    Videos have a high friction to update. Out of date docmentation is worse than no documentation at all.

    Wikis have a low friction to update. Even the new hire can fix things as they execute the procedures.

    I don't know why people would use videos, but then I also think that videos are terrible learning tools. But then, maybe it's just me, there are some strong visual learners out there.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Art3x ( 973401 )

      Videos have a high friction to update. . . .

      Wikis have a low friction to update. Even the new hire can fix things as they execute the procedures.

      I don't know why people would use videos.

      I agree, most things don't need a video. I well-written set of steps is usually enough.

      Even so, if you do have some videos, and they're on Youtube, you just need a wiki that can support hyperlinks --- which is all wikis.

  • You don't want a Wiki, you want a Content Management System (CMS). I'd suggest Joomla [joomla.org]. There are lots of extensions for delivering video [joomla.org].

  • I've been involved in many, many projects to share internal knowledge over the years. I had pretty much given up all hope on wiki technology until I got to the latest versions of Confluence, which strikes an excellent balance between flexibility, simplicity, and automation.

    Doing the task you outlined (create multiple playlists of media files) could be done in a variety of ways: Create a "File List" page and upload your content, then create separate pages linking to them; create a page and attach the multime

  • Video is a format which perhaps will make it easier for content creators to quickly throw something up onto he web. Most of the time, however, that's just what it will be: throw up. Crafting a quality video requires a significant time investment as well as skills and tools that your content creators likely will not have. Furthermore, for the end user (an employee at your company that requires training) video will be less than ideal because it is a poor format for learning and reference: - you cannot cons

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Exactly.

      Videos aren't easy things to produce, and properly producing them will take longer than writing them up.

      That said, there is value in doing a video - it can be easier to show complex steps by doing it in a video that one can pause and rewind as well as show things like where you turn around the object rather than try to illustrate it.

      However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a text description, and you shouldn't have long videos - no more than a couple of minutes. If it's a long procedure, then h

  • My vote is for Drupal. Wordpress & Joomla don't seem to be flexible enough for these kinds of deployments (at least for us). We built a procedure/policy/asset/access/resource tracking website with Drupal. It handles procedural documentation, policies, equipment assignments, loaner device checkout program, software license assignments, and much more. We dropped in an LDAP module, and life was good. We used to run a wiki too, but the requirement to hand code special markup was a turn-off for most of

  • Not a wiki, but it gives you that "internal YouTube" kinda thing: www.vimp.com [vimp.com]

    Even has a freebie community edition [vimp.com].

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I maintain my company's knowledge systems. Multimedia videos have several problems:

    - They are not accessible to the hard of hearing or the vision-impaired.You may be breaking the law unless you invest the effort to caption every single video.
    - They are hard to search. Unless you create transcripts/captions or extensively meta-tag the videos it's really hard to find specific content.
    - They are not easy to update. Generally you have to reshoot and re-edit the entire video.
    - They take a lot of time an

  • It's not free, it's a pain to administer and many really helpful and good 3rd party add-ons aren't free either (heck, some can be more expensive than the thing itself!). But at the end of the day it can do pretty much anything you could possibly wish for while being simple enough to USE that anyone who used Word before could start out quickly.

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