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Follow Up on Using Mediawiki as a Personal Document Management System

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Several months ago I wrote about using my personal Mediawiki as a Document Management System.  I am writing to follow up on my experience with that.  It’s actually working out wonderfully.  I am always tempted to make things more complicated than they need to be, but for my needs using a wiki for document management works perfectly.

I have uploaded various documents of personal interest, such as time sheets, offer letters, tax information, etc. and I have access to these bits of information from any web browser.  Much more efficient than trying to look through my filing system at home, consisting of an underused file drawer and a highly used system of “piles of mail spread around”.

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Wiki as Document Management System

Thursday, April 17th, 2008


I mentioned my personal wiki the other day. I thought I’d post a quick note about using it as a Document Management System. I’m horrible at keeping on top of documents, electronic and physical. Although I have a filing cabinet, I can never remember where I have filed my mail and other personal papers. I do a fairly good job of keeping my My Documents subdirectory organized on my desktop PC, but that doesn’t help me if I need access to files when I’m not at home.

I have been researching open source Document Management Systems, but it occurred to me that I already have a wiki and with my People Keeper project I’m concerned about further fragmenting my personal data across multiple systems. So I decided to try using my personal wiki as a DMS.

I’d say the project is in “beta” at this point, but so far it seems to work well. The nice thing is that I don’t have to worry about filing documents under one location as it’s searchable and I can link to one document from as many different places as I’d like. The wiki already handles the case of multiple versions, so I don’t have to worry about version control. And it’s very simple to set up.

I’m using MediaWiki which isn’t really intended for storing general purpose documents. It considers everything an image. In truth though, it can handle whatever type of file you give it. I only had to make a few small modifications to the LocalSettings.php file. (more…)

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