Case Study: MoinMoin usage at the German Aerospace Center

The German Aerospace Center (German: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, short: DLR) is the national research center for aviation and space flight of Germany. It has about 5.600 employees in 28 institutions at 13 places (8 in Germany).

The following interview is with Andreas Schreiber (head of the distributed systems and component software department of the Simulation and Software Technology division located in Cologne-Porz) and issued from RafaelWeber during the GHOP Contest. In this division they develop things like AeroGrid. For more information, take a look at http://www.dlr.de/sc/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-1205/

Summary

The DLR changed to MoinMoin because they use Python in their projects and so it is easy extendable and configurable for them. They made many macros that make the work easier for them. For example, one macro searches their bug tracker for a given issue and shows a summary within the wiki page..

They like it and use it quite often - every employee uses the wiki half an hour per day.

The wiki is for them like a huge notice board: they store a lot of media (presentation papers, conference photos, etc.), personal stuff on their own userpages (own projects, contact information, ICQ lists) and of course the things related to their projects. They are very happy with the support they get from MoinMoin development and even know some MoinMoin developers personally.

This all sounds perfect, but they even have problems with the backup solutions and they are going to split the wiki into two (internet and intranet). And Andreas Schreiber misses some features other wiki engines have already.

For more details, read on.

Q & A

Q: Could you please make a short description of your institution and the center in Cologne?

A: In Cologne, where I live and work is the headquarter of the DLR and the administration office for all locations. The DLR is the largest German research center and is splitted into two parts:

• Research: people work in the DLR and research. That is the part where I am active.

• Management: the DLR also engage other companies and firms.

I work at the DLR as software engineer in the Simulation and Software Technology division. 28 people (ca. 90% of them are software developers and IT specialists) work in this division. For more information about this and my job, see the SISTEC homepage

Q: Who uses the MoinMoin wiki in your institute? And for what?

A: Everybody there. But there are some people from other research centers or partners working together with us on some projects. I estimate that there are about 100 wiki users.

Q: Which piece of data is stored in the wiki?

A: All sorts of data. Of course information for our projects with graphics and other diagrams and conversation logs. The user often have in their wiki homepage such half-private pages for diploma thesisses or skilled works. I, for myself upload presentation papers.

we also have a page with a list of ICQ numbers of everybody in the institution and a lot of other stuff.

Q: Which version of MoinMoin do you use?

A: Uh. Let me look, 1.5.6.

Q: How much data (MiB/GiB) is stored in the wiki currently?

A: In our public wiki:

• cumulative page size: 2574.7 KiB
• pages: 835

• used space of /home/wwwadmin/moin-1.5.6-inst/share/moin/scwiki/data/: 195.4 MiB

Q: How much time do you (and your colleagues) spend in the wiki? (Read, Write, Clean)

Per employee approx. an half hour on average daily.

Q: How much traffic is the wiki making per month?

I don't know, but there is nothing that causes problems.

Why do you use Moin? Which experiences did you made with other wiki software? Why did you change?

A: In the past, we used PmWiki and TWiki with other research centers. But we changed because MoinMoin is written in python and in our projects we use python or for our clients if they have no special wishes. So it is easy to extend it with macros and plugins.

Q: Is MoinMoin user-friendly for you?

A: Yes, we modified it, that it meets our needs exactly. So we are really happy with it.

Q: Which plugins/macros do you use?

A:We use the standard things like TableOfContents, Search, the various calendar macros, etc. but we also wrote a lot of own macros.

Q: What for example?

A: We use Mantis for bugtracking. To combine it with MoinMoin, we wrote a macro: In its simplest form it is called MantisIssue(ID). As result is a little table with important status information from the Mantis entry and links to edit the issue printed in the wiki page.

Q: Did you have to change the (non-plugin) core code of moin?

A: No. We just edited the theme and wrote some extensions (macros).

Q: Do you use your own theme? What is changed from the basic?

A: Yes, we changed the header, navi, colors.. almost everything. Our goal is a very similiar look to our normal website

Q: Do you upload many files? Which type of files?

A: Yes. We upload many pictures: If we have a meeting, we write/draw diagrams etc. on the blackboard, then we photograph the blackboard and upload the photographs to the wiki for people who weren't at the meeting. Some people (like me) also upload presentations.

Q: How big are those files? How do you update they?

A: Very different. From some Kilobytes up to 50 Megabytes or more. We update the files by delete them and reupload them. But that happens not often.

Q: How do you think about the wiki formatting? Is it easy to use for you?

A: Yes. It's pretty simple and similiar to other wikis like MediaWiki.

Q: How do you think about the changes in the formatting rules in version 1.6? (macros, linking, ...)

A: I wonder because I don't know why they changed it, but the developement team will have reasons for this. It doesn't matter for me if it is now [[ or <<. It just should work and I hope to get no problems with existing pages if we update to 1.6.

Q: Do you use the wiki in the intranet or in the internet?

A: Both. We have our own wiki server. You can reach it via internet and via intranet. But we are going to change this: We will have an internal wiki that is only used by us and one "public".

Q: What do you think about the principle to store pages as textfile and not use a database engine?

A: Nothing - not much. It is really bad for backups. You must know, we make use of T-Systems business solutions, especially backup services. And the prices get calculated with the number of files. For every wiki page there are a few files, so our backup costs for the wiki are very high. We would save thousands of euros every year if there is another solution.

Q: And why don't you code something that exports it in a SQL database or something different and unpack it after the backup?

A: As first we must write the script, what we must maintain. Although is the whole file system included in the backup, you might delete the many files with the page content and restore them after finishing it, to save money. In this time could nobody work with the wiki, what is not acceptable, because we have users from New Zealand, China or the USA, who work in the "German night time". We also don't know the point of time when the backup starts.

Q: What do you think about the new Anti-Spam feature "TextCha" that is new in version 1.6?

A: I tested it with my local wiki. It's a nice spam protection, but we don't use it in our wiki, because we have no problems with any kind of spam and we are still using version 1.5.

Q: What's your opinion about Open Source? Especially in your organisation.

A: We use Open Source (Linux, Python, ...) with pleasure and we develop Open Source projects at work, too.

Q: What's your rating of the MoinMoin support?

A: The support is very good. I'm in good contact with the developer ReimarBauer. But HeinrichWendel (SOC 2007 student doing the storage refactoring task) also works for us. He knows much about the wiki engine, too. So we don't need to use the mailing list or IRC.

Q: What's your rating about the MoinMoin documentation?

A: Well, it's improvable. You don't know where to look up for what. For example, recently a colleague came to me and asked why there is no consistent documentation about writing macros. It does not have a (good) structure.

Q: What's your wish for MoinMoin? Which feature do you miss?

A: Section editing from pages, something like a little "Edit" link after every subheading so that you can edit each part indepentent from the others (MediaWiki has this feature already). Otherwise nothing that could be done by macros.

Q: Which tips/recommendations do you have for other MoinMoin user?

A: You must take the time to care about your wikipages. You must keep them up-to-date and clean/delete pages in regular intervals. Otherwise the users get confused. We have an employee whose main job is caring for the web site and the wiki.

Q: Ok, final question: When you must rate MoinMoin from a scale from 0 - 10, what would you give it?

A: 8. Because it is better than other wikis I know, but still not perfect.