Hi Alison,
We've just begun to set up a wiki for
our internal divisional use. As it is, our wiki project is a tentative
test for six months to examine whether it's particularly useful for most
of the staff. We find our coworkers are divided between those who
enjoy keeping abreast and trying out new ideas, and those who strongly
prefer to keep doing things the way they've always been doing things and
don't like any change. In this respect, you should read up on strategies
for adopting a wiki -- it takes a lot of work to change staff attitudes
and behavior.
As a previous respondent said, you can't
consider setting up an onsite wiki without a lot of communication with
your IT department. When we expressed interest in this kind of software,
our IT department asked us a couple of good questions, the best of which
was: "Why do you need a wiki as opposed to an internal website?"
In other words, if you just want to have documentation available,
you don't need a wiki for that. You need to ask yourselves, "What
exactly do you want to achieve using a wiki that you can't achieve in other
ways?"
As it turned out, our IT department
selected the software for us, based on a variety of factors (ease of installation,
documentation, firewall safety, IP authentication, etc.) - and they--like
many libraries in the US--chose MediaWiki, the same software that runs
Wikipedia.
I suggest you to look at Library Success,
a library wiki that discusses the use of wikis in libraries, and concludes
with an extensive bibliography:
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Wiki_World
--
Bob Kosovsky, Ph.D., Curator, Rare Books
and Manuscripts
Music Division -- The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Listowner: OPERA-L ; SMT-TALK ; SMT-ANNOUNCE ; SoundForge-users
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