Semantic Mediawiki Update

Way back in 2008, I wrote my first posts on Semantic Wikis, how I chose Semantic Mediawiki, and even got into a discussion with Jack about their value.

When I came to ProModel last year, I was able to have Semantic Mediawiki installed and started using it as a knowledge repository for the development team.  I store the following kinds of information in the wiki:

1. Background information about the customer, their requirements, business rules, their business and their field.  Particularly useful is an encyclopedia of all of the terms that are used in our application and in design discussions.  This is what Mediawiki was built for and what it excels at.
2. Notes from meetings, usability research and customer feedback.  These tend to be semi-structured and used as references for designs.  The "Semantic" extension of Mediawiki allows me to mark up my notes with category and property tags so that they can be organized and found later when I need them.
3. Finally, I write the complete user interface specification in the wiki.  The wiki gives me a quick and easy way to publish on our intranet and share with the customer.  The semantic tags allow me to slice and dice the specification for analysis (e.g., show me all the screens that have an "Export" button) and integration with my cool automated testing rig (see my earlier posts on Sikuli).  A nice benefit of driving your testing directly from the specification is that it forces the specification to be up-to-date (or the tests fail).

Benefits of Semantic Mediawiki:

1. It's free and open source
2. It's very reliable
3. Tons of free and open source extensions
4. Quick and easy way to publish online with semantic tags to for retrieval, analysis and automation

Drawbacks of Semantic Mediawiki:

1. Like all open source projects, you need to be somewhat technically savvy to install, configure the product and its extensions.
2. The Semantic Mediawiki extension is not perfectly compatible with some other useful MediaWiki extensions
3. Not everyone is comfortable writing on a wiki.  Adoption can be sporadic.

Overall, I'm happy with the product, but I would consider other options that may have the same benefits with less of the drawbacks.  However, many of the best options are not free and charge a monthly, per user fee.  For example, I have used the Socialtext and Sharepoint wikis previously and they seem to be more usable (in some ways), but less semantic and much more expensive.