Internal company Wiki question

[stroker]

I'll try to make this short. I work in a call center for a retail mail order facility where one of our primary tasks is to answer product questions. Our turnover is traditionally high which makes product training very challenging. If Management invests in training they generally watch it walk out the door in a matter of months. We've often considered developing a Wiki for use by the staff but Management won't bite from either a labor or financial perspective.

I want to take a stab at developing the thing on my time and then testing it. If we can do a proof of concept and demonstrate actual value I think they may allow us to adopt it. The carrot, for me, is that I hope I can get a raise as the "moderator" of the Wiki. My possible divorce has put me in dire financial straits and I need that potential salary. Basically, I'm looking at giving them an excuse to give me a couple of bucks an hour more as a raise.

Can anyone recommend a good freeware/shareware program that I could use to start this Wiki? Failing that, I need the cheapest possible alternative as it's coming out of my pocket. Suggestions?

[Insomniac]

Will you eventually be setting this up on a company server?

You can use what Wikipedia uses: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

And here is a list of different Wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software

[nrc]

One of the problems with many Wikis is that the markup for editing and linking documents is often not easy for a neophyte to understand. This can make it challenging to get people to contribute the information you'd like to document. We have this problem even within a technical team where people would rather just paste Word documents than figure out the markup for linking. That kind of defeats the purpose.

Rather than a wiki you might try looking at a social CMS like Drupal or Pligg. While it may require a bit more effort to get into the form you want, something like that may provide a more user friendly way to contribute information.

[stroker]

Thanks, guys. I'm sure initially it would NOT be on the work server. They'd have to see it in action first and determine whether they wanted to adopt it.

Ease of update would certainly be a factor in the creation of the thing, but I don't expect information to change significantly once it's been entered. I think I would get suggestions forwarded to me and I'd be the guy responsible for entering the new data.

[Insomniac]

One of the problems with many Wikis is that the markup for editing and linking documents is often not easy for a neophyte to understand. This can make it challenging to get people to contribute the information you'd like to document. We have this problem even within a technical team where people would rather just paste Word documents than figure out the markup for linking. That kind of defeats the purpose.

Rather than a wiki you might try looking at a social CMS like Drupal or Pligg. While it may require a bit more effort to get into the form you want, something like that may provide a more user friendly way to contribute information.

MediaWiki has a Visual Editor (WYSIWYG), but I haven't used it. We use Confluence at work, but it's not cheap.

[nrc]

MediaWiki has a Visual Editor (WYSIWYG), but I haven't used it. We use Confluence at work, but it's not cheap.

We use Jive SBS. Also very pricey. Soon to be replaced with SharePoint for everything.

Sent from my Droid RAZR M

[Insomniac]

We use Jive SBS. Also very pricey. Soon to be replaced with SharePoint for everything.

Sent from my Droid RAZR M

I hope you guys have good SharePoint programmers. Our company wants everyone to use it, but won't invest in making Add-Ins to make it more usable. We use it to store documents mostly if we can get away with it.

[nrc]

I hope you guys have good SharePoint programmers. Our company wants everyone to use it, but won't invest in making Add-Ins to make it more usable. We use it to store documents mostly if we can get away with it.

"Is it suitable for the purpose." is below "Is it from Microsoft." on our current list of criteria.