I’ve been poking around mediawiki a bit because I just set up a personal one. Some of the users of my personal wiki aren’t going to be very technologically savvy, so I thought of putting some information to help them use the wiki. I created some quick editing tips, how to login, and then I thought, “how am i going to explain what the heck this thing is?” That’s when I remembered CommonCraft‘s video, Wikis in Plain English (see below):

So I thought wouldn’t it be great to embed the Wiki’s in Plain English video into a wiki so that people can figure out what it is before beginning to use it. I found a great extension called VideoFlash that allows you to embed a number of different video types into a MediaWiki site. So I included the Wiki’s in Plain English video on my personal wiki as well.

Then I thought, “hey i can use this for my mediawiki farm at work”. We have a mediawiki farm here at Wheaton that allows multiple wikis to exist on with just one MediaWiki installation. One of my to do lists is to create a main page for the farm. I thought what could be on the main page is a form asking people to sign up for a wiki. I then thought maybe the main page could be a wiki. Users could see the video, and fill out information via a form.

So I found a very simple extension that is basically a form handler that will email the information submitted by the user to whatever email you would like, its called:
FormHandler send form by Email

I’m still not sure if I’m going to go this route, but it is a possibility and maybe something that others might find interesting as well.