My company is looking to improve their market research data management.

Current data management style:


"Hey Jimbo, where's that picture of our WhatZit 2.0?
"yeah I remember that email about that company from that guy, gimme a few minutes to search my Outlook"
"who has the newest copy of the Important Competitor's product catalogue? Mine is from 2009." ... "Colleen does, and she's on maternity leave. You'll have to call her to get her workstation password..."


Desired data management style:


data organized neatly by topic (legal, economic, industrial, competitor)
for each topic, multiple media types stored together (company product images, press releases, contact info) but still neatly sorted by type
data editing histories
communal access (no data silos)


I was thinking about setting up a department wiki for all users to access. It seems to satisfy the four criteria above, but I'm a little concerned about how user-friendly (read: decipherable to non-technical people) it is for the more advanced features like image galleries, article formatting, and the like.

Has anyone here setup a wiki for non-IT people and had it not catch on fire, become a ghost town, or look like Geocities?

Bonus question: can you see any obvious drawbacks to my choice of MediaWiki (or any other wiki) for solving this problem?

(I'm hoping that some of you will have encountered this issue before and can offer some insights...)

Direct answer to your question: Yes. Wikipedia has tons of non-IT editors.

Longer answer: Your IT vs non-IT distinction here is a red herring. All people, IT or not, will still ignore a wiki if it isn't presented to them as something they should care about. Introducing a new data management system is always non-trivial to sell to people because you always have to make them want to change. For example, if the programmers don't see too much problem with the current bug tracking system and/or think that switching to the new one is a hassle, then they won't switch.

You need to sell the new system by explaining how it improves everything, plus explain the problems with the current system, and do things to assure people that this isn't just a passing fancy and the new system is here to stay. After all, if people think it's a doomed project then it will be a doomed project.
