Introduced MoinMoin at the H1 experiment at DESY, Hamburg to support internal documentation and organisation.
Email: <gbrandt AT SPAMFREE mail DOT desy DOT de>
Success Story
After more than one year after its introduction, the use of MoinMoin at H1 can finally be called a success. H1 is a large high-energy physics experiment with about 250 members. In the beginning (the first year or so) resistance against a wiki was very large. concerns were:
- its a unneccessary overhead w.r.t to just editing html pages from the shell
- it doesn't work in text mode (yes, physicists are extremely conservative and some still use lynx!)
- one has to register, and it doesn't work (cookies have to be enabled and one has to click the right button)
- existing pages are duplicated, doubling the maintenance effort and confusing users
- one has to learn "yet another language" (wiki markup)
- its ugly and every page looks the same
faced with colleagues who were unwilling or unable to overcome even extremely low thresholds as these, i thought the H1 wiki would be failure and its use basically restricted to myself. in the beginning, i set up templates and standard formats for organising meetings, software versions etc. and started to organise the work i was involved with in the wiki:
- Software Version Tracking: every version of the H1 analysis software has its own page with the changes (new CVS tags plus comments) listed. contributors to the software put their changes of the page. the release coordinator then assembles (or integrates as it is called) the release based on this information.
- Working Group Meetings: since the experiment is so large, work on different physics topics is split up in working groups (WG). all the WGs organise regular meetings. i successfully forced my own WG to organise their meetings on the wiki. other WGs followed reluctantly, but now all of them use the wiki.
the real break-through in acceptance came when the physics coordinator requested that a wiki page be set up for every analysis. this was the first time that "official" wiki pages were required by the managment. In the wake of this success i was motivated to install more macros to create automated lists. for example, lists of talks on a certain analysis are created automatically from the WG meeting agendas and place on the analysis page.
because the H1 wiki contains internal unpublished results and information of H1 physics analyses, it is unfortunately not public for you to check it out. but i will be happy to answer any questions posted to this page.
Messages to me
Hi and welcome! Maybe you can help accelerating moin a bit. 
-- ThomasWaldmann 2005-04-02 10:09:21