How to start a wiki in your business

Maybe you as the reader of this checklist are the future maintainer of your business wiki. Be prepared for the following tasks, or to delegate them to more suitable coworkers.

• check this check list (when reading this item twice, beware of infinite recursion )
• be encouraged!
• be a trainer!
• be a support center!
• be an editor!

Obviously, there are many good reasons for starting a wiki. But, which benefits can your business achieve from a wiki?

Starting a wiki, and running it successfully, costs time.

• Which information systems in your business are affected by a wiki?
  • do you have a content or document management system running? You probably don't want to complicate the workflows by introducing yet-another-information-system!
  • do you have fileserver/file shares? You probably want to share the knowledge about these contents in the wiki!
  • do you have an intranet running? You might have to split the content areas between intranet and wiki!
• which knowledge you want to share (see also: Check 5: Choose proper content areas)?
  • static information can be stored in a simple intranet application, too!
  • media files are usually better managed in a media/asset management system!
• how is collaborative work done in your business?
  • are there certain workflows? Maybe a document/content management system is better for you!
  • do you have large, distributed teams? Keep in mind: you have to share the knowledge about the wiki, too!

There are a lot of wiki engines available, many of them can be compared in http://www.wikimatrix.org.

How do you decide what features are required for you organization's needs?

• Are they solely IT professionals in your group of wiki editors?
  • Congratulations: you are not restricted in choosing wiki syntax! Otherwise you probably need a wysiwyg wiki.
• Do you need a hosting service or do you plan to maintain the wiki engine yourself?
  • If you have confidential content, you probably don't want to put it outside your office…
• Do you want to run the wiki engine on existing servers?
  • Then you are restricted on the system requirements.
• Is your team distributed?
  • RSS feeds are a convenient way to keep anybody up-to-date on changes of the wiki content. But, maybe you have to introduce coworkers to RSS first.
  • Email notifications about changes may be very useful for you.
  • The larger and the more distributed the team is, the more you probably want to regulate the access and edit rights. Check out each wiki software's Security and Antispam section properties!

The more content is stored in the wiki, the more people use it.

So, how to unleash the power of the wiki virus? You are stuck in the problem of producing the initial content. The wiki users may turn into wiki editors (at the break-even point) or maybe not.

If you don't want to build up the initial content alone, setup a team of trailblazers.

Choosing them from different divisions may be clever: both for having allies distributed in your organisation and the intial content will become more common.

The main disadvantage of a wiki is the lack of structure.

If you dont want a clump of content, setup the initial taxonomy and strategy yourself. Think about whether your audience will understand and be able to use categories or stricter namespaces. It might be useful to restrict editing rights of important pages, such as the index pages.

And don't forget to

• setup a playground page (also called a sandbox) where users can practice writing content
• setup a howto and documentation

The main advantage of a wiki is the lack of structure.

Don't overdo it with structuring the Wiki. Wikis tend to work best when users can decide themselves where to put things.

• Let things grow
• Refactor whenever needed
• Set up guidelines not rules

Setting up the wiki content is time consuming.

be prepared to:

• convince your boss
• teach your allies
• setup content
• teach and support your coworkers