If you’re going to make a “Wiki” then why not use a Wiki?
We have an IT Wiki here, built using MediaWiki which is what Wikipedia is built on.
What I think would be good about this is that, for example, Jason could create a post “Can we make some bins non-nettable?” and then enter the details but you can make links as you do that, so as he details it, he encloses “non-nettable” as [[non-nettable]] and it now links to a page for that. He doesn’t have to go fill in that page, unless he wants to, but somebody else can if they see the red link and decide they have a free minute.
The original EpicWiki was also built on MediaWiki. It turns out that building or linking pages isn’t the difficult part of a Wiki, it’s getting to an acceptable format. For example, a company page on Wikipedia has:
A Title
A content block (built by MediaWIki from header content)
A company block built by a user
A main section
A History section
Various misc sections (aquisitions, …)
See Also section
External Links section
Not every Company page has this exact format but there is an enough of a consensus that most Company pages generally follow this outline.
How to format content is a struggle for every Wiki regardless of the hosting platform. This is the point of this post. What kind of “articles” would an Kinetic Wiki need and what would the structure be for each type of article? This post was asking first: what would we want. Once we got that, the next step is how to format those entities.
Honestly, I don’t think you have enough people to hit critical mass on a wiki. For example, wikipedia, only 1% of users actually edit content.
There are 8100 users on EpiUsers. Of which I’m sure there is a large portion that are inactive, or duplicate accounts. So on the best case scenario, you have 81 people, but more likely it’s going to be something like 10 people contributing. I don’t think that’s enough people to manage a volunteer run wiki.
Your point is spot on. The problem we had with MediaWiki and EpicWiki is that you first have to train people on MediaWiki syntax:
Bold and italics
Bold and italics are defined using two and three single-quotes, respectively. They can also be combined together. The following wikitext:
Is ‘‘that’’ your ‘’‘desk’‘’ on my ‘’‘’‘front lawn’‘’‘’?
…will produce this display:
Is that your desk on my front lawn?
(In fairness, replace " with * and it’s Markdown but at least we have an editor for this)
And then you have to know the format of a certain type of page: country, person, discography, book, etc. and the specialized blocks required by those in order to create the article. It’s amazing that Wikipedia exists at all.
With that in mind, this is why I still haven’t given up…just quite yet…on an EpicWiki:
Our domain is much smaller than Wikipedia
We may have enough active people on this list who are referring others to existing content that will actually save them time having the Wiki
Markdown is used here and there is already an editor to make changes to existing content easier and Markdown editors exist in VS Code for systems like DocFx.
We can develop template pages for items defined above to make new articles easier to write.
Our articles only have to have enough content to be searchable with links back to original content
Yes I have tried to add links but it has been getting steadily more difficult as the amount of content on this site increases.
FWIW, instead of a Wiki… I’ve long had an interest in search capabilities.
Mostly because I’m lazy… and suspect a Wiki could turn into a lot of work?
But… I have not yet progressed beyond using Googles Advanced Search
So, the last several days, I have been saying to myself, “Self, I wish there was an Epicor Wiki out there.”
Well, maybe not those exact words.
But really, I want this now.
This week at work it’s, “How do PO Requisitions work in Epicor?” I can’t find much on the site here - I guess it’s yet another thing that everyone already knows how to do it. The help isn’t much help. So I will do as I always do, which is to just test everything and dive deep into yet another project I don’t have time for.
And that’s fine and all, but when I am done, I want to share my knowledge with the world (literally) so that the next poor sap that for some reason doesn’t already know everything, he can get a running start anyway.
What I am saying is, put me on the committee @Mark_Wonsil
P.S.
i.e. why a Wiki (or something)
I’m sure, like myself… many other users have created/collected End User docs over the years?
I have dreamed of a common repository for uploading “stuff”
self organizing, with advanced search capabilities
and finally “someone” who could spare the time review from time to time and clear out any stray “chaff”
but… might be a lot chaos to overcome?
But then I search “Cycle Count” in EpicCare, EpicWeb, or EpiUsers/Yahoo. So many hits. There are posts about the process, about specific Vantage/Epicor/Kinetic functionality, errors running, etc.
What I’m promoting is not necessarily a wiki in as much as an executive summary of the resources it points to. I only use wiki because it has to be crowd-sourced and easy for people to contribute to.
In the early days of the Internet, there were just ftp servers with files. You had to know which server and the filename to get anything. Then someone came up with Gopher. It was just text files that contained descriptions about the files on that particular ftp site then became a menu system. Later, other search engines indexed the Gopher pages (Veronica and Jughead were the most famous which were competitors to Archie - which actually downloaded FTP files to try to index them IIRC…). Eventually, this gave way to modern search engines. And honestly, search hasn’t gotten much better. Having some curated pages that would help the search engine is really what I’m after.
Reminds me that I used to have a Compuserve account - where things were "kind of " orderly.
In spite of the constraints, I sometimes look back fondly to times before the chaos of the internet.
I just had a thought! (I know, I’m proud of myself too)
I think there should be a “This answered my question” somewhere. Whether it is for the whole post, the response that was marked as the answer, or just any reply.
Wouldn’t that help in building a Wiki? Here is my example. I was looking for some help on how the out of the box Shipping Labels work. I searched and got a bunch of hits. After opening a few, I finally found my answer here.
It got me thinking because if you search for Shipping Labels across the whole site, it was way down in the list. If we allowed an answered my question functionality, then we could use that as a sort. Posts with most answered my questions rise to the top.
