[MegaDeKay]

We started with a self-hosted mediawiki server and this did not go well. Expecting someone not very computer savvy (and there are lots of those in my company) to dive into the markup on a page and not make a mess of it was a bad idea. At that time at least the WSIWYG editor was not very usable. Don't know if that is still the case.

So off we went to Atlassian. It has many flaws, but nobody is pining for the old days of Mediawiki. And the hooks Confluence has in to Jira is something you don't get with plain Mediawiki, and that has real use for us.

[jfrunyon]

You can literally go see for yourself how the WYSIWYG editor works these days. I suspect it's come a long way since the last time you checked it.

My bigger question though is why the average user is important. Most large companies have employees whose entire job is ... knowledge management. If they can't figure out how to write wikitext then maybe they're not a good fit for the role?

[macintux]

> My bigger question though is why the average user is important. Most large companies have employees whose entire job is ... knowledge management. If they can't figure out how to write wikitext then maybe they're not a good fit for the role?

If your wiki limits its contributors to experts, you're doing it wrong.

[jfrunyon]

Regardless of limitations, the vast majority of edits tend to be by those whose job it is.

[macintux]

I'm struggling to remember any job I've had where documentation was primarily the realm of tech writers. Certainly none of the large companies. One startup had a dedicated tech writer but engineers and evangelists still wrote much of the documentation.