TeleWiki

TeleWiki is a knowledge base about business internet and telecommunications in The Netherlands. It was created in 2007 by B. Mulckhuijse and is maintained by several experts.

Apart from technical and commercial information, TeleWiki provides an overview of the Dutch market for business internet and telecommunications solutions. IT specialists, procurement officers and consultants use it to quickly find and evaluate viable solution, and create a shortlist of manufacturers and providers.

Background
The basic idea of TeleWiki is to provide professionals with a trustworthy and objective source of information about telecom products and providers. We originally came up with the concept in summer 2007.

TeleWiki started as an internal reference database for a telecommunications consultancy business. When TeleWiki grew bigger it was made accessible for customers, to help them with "Frequently Asked Questions". After a short period TeleWiki was opened up for everybody under the CC-BY-SA license. After a few iterations we stuck with the Mediawiki platform, and developments have been steady since.

In 2013 TeleWiki was upgraded with the Semantic MediaWiki extension to enable querying the vast database of companies and products. Semantic Forms was added, and forms were developed, to simplify data entry by inexperienced wiki-users.

The main categories of articles are about:
 * Organisations, like providers and suppliers
 * Product pages with brief factual product information
 * Use cases, about real implementation of products
 * Lists, market surveys, and miscellaneous overviews

Part of the brief was:


 * No advertising, no banners, no commercial information
 * Apart from free-format pages, standard templates should be available for regular categories of subjects
 * Only registered (and no anonymous) users will be allowed to edit information

Skinning & extensions
TeleWiki uses the standard Vector skin, the same skin Wikipedia uses. We stuck to using the Vector skin, with only a few adaptions, because most visitors are familiar with it. It is ‘’clean’’, very functional and in combination with the absence of promotions helps users to entrust our website.

Amongst many other extensions, TeleWiki relies on the extension External Data for providing lists of products, providers, datacenters etc. etc.

View all implemented extensions on the special system overview page

Discussion and comments
Discussions on TeleWiki are supported with the Widgets extension, which enables Disqus comments on all pages.