Wiki Sites: The Ultimate Guide to What They Are and How to Create One
Have you ever wished there was an easy way to store, organize and collaborate on important information within your company or team? A central repository where anyone can go to quickly find what they need, contribute their own knowledge, and know that the content is always up-to-date? Enter the wiki.
You‘re likely already familiar with the most famous example – Wikipedia. But wikis are not just for encyclopedic entries created by the public. Businesses and organizations of all sizes use wikis internally to boost productivity, streamline communication, preserve institutional knowledge, onboard employees faster, and much more.
In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll dive into exactly what a wiki is, the benefits it provides, and how you can go about creating and maintaining one for your own business. By the end, you‘ll be a wiki wizard ready to supercharge your company‘s information sharing and collaboration. Let‘s get started!
What is a Wiki?
A wiki is a collaborative website that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are designed to enable multiple people to contribute and modify content in a shared space. Rather than documents and knowledge being siloed on individual computers or inboxes, a wiki brings everything together in one central, searchable, interconnected location.
The defining characteristic of a wiki is that it utilizes simplified markup language or a rich-text editor that allows even non-technical users to easily format text and create new pages. Wikis also heavily use internal linking to connect related information together.
You can think of a wiki like a extensive, browsable knowledge base that‘s created and curated by the people who use it. It‘s a living collection of information that‘s continuously updated and refined, getting more valuable over time, as opposed to static documents that become outdated sitting in forgotten folders.
Beyond text, wikis can also store other media like images, videos and file attachments. So instead of having important assets scattered across different platforms, everything related to a particular topic or project is consolidated in the relevant wiki page.
Internal vs. External Wikis
There are two main types of wikis – internal and external. As the names imply, internal wikis are used within an organization and require a login to access and edit, while external wikis are public-facing.
Internal wikis are fantastic for:
- Employee handbooks and onboarding materials
- Company policies and process documentation
- Project plans, meeting notes and status updates
- Technical documentation and troubleshooting guides
- Sales enablement resources
- Preserving knowledge as employees come and go
Essentially, any information that employees need to do their jobs that would benefit from collaborative editing can go in an internal wiki. Many companies completely replace their intranets with wikis.
External wikis are great for:
- Knowledge bases and help centers
- Community-sourced resource collections
- Open source software documentation
- Crowdsourced how-to guides
- Public databases and directories
While internal wikis boost efficiency and alignment within organizations, external wikis facilitate large-scale collaboration around shared interests and help make the world‘s knowledge more accessible.
The most famous example of an external wiki is of course Wikipedia. Other examples include Fandom powered by Wikia which hosts fan-created encyclopedias on pop culture topics, Wikitravel for crowdsourced travel guides, and wikiHow for how-to articles on every conceivable topic. Many open source projects like WordPress and Elasticsearch also use public wikis for technical documentation that the community can contribute to.
For the rest of this guide we‘ll focus on internal wikis for businesses, but many of the principles apply to external wikis as well. The key difference is that sensitive company information shouldn‘t be shared publicly.
Benefits of Using a Wiki for Your Business
So why bother setting up a wiki? Can‘t employees just share documents and knowledge the old fashioned way through email, chat apps, and clunky shared drives?
Technically yes, but there are major advantages to moving company knowledge into a wiki:
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Information is easier to find and reference in a structured wiki vs digging through old messages and files. Especially with a good search function and intuitive organization.
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Content can be collaboratively created, updated and vetted by the relevant experts, increasing accuracy and trust vs relying on outdated documentation.
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Wikis preserve important knowledge so it‘s not lost as employees switch roles or leave the company. The next person can pick up right where the last left off.
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New hires can get up to speed much faster when all the information they need is consolidated and interconnected in a wiki vs scattered communications.
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Version history shows how pages have evolved over time and allows rolling back changes if needed. No more rogue employees messing things up.
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Wikis break down silos between teams and departments. Everyone contributes to and benefits from the collective knowledge.
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The ability for anyone to edit empowers employees to document their own knowledge and suggest improvements, vs relying on gatekeepers.
When you add it all up, wikis boost productivity, streamline communication, preserve institutional knowledge, and create a culture of transparency and collaboration. All of which provide major business value, especially as companies grow and become more geographically distributed.
A study by McKinsey found that employees spend 19% of their work week searching for and gathering information. That‘s a full day each week! Wikis cut down on a lot of that wasted time and frustration by making company knowledge easily accessible from one collaborative hub.
How to Create a Wiki for Your Business
Sold on the benefits and ready to set up a wiki for your company or team? Follow these steps:
Step 1: Choose Your Wiki Platform
The first step is selecting which wiki software to use. There are three main options:
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Standalone wiki software that you host yourself like MediaWiki, DokuWiki or TikiWiki. These tend to be free and open source but require more technical setup and maintenance.
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Wikis that are part of a larger collaboration tool like Confluence, Notion, Google Sites, or Microsoft Teams. These are easier to use and manage but may lack advanced features and customization.
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Dedicated wiki SaaS platforms like Tettra, Guru or Slab. These offer the best of both worlds with powerful wiki features and integrations along with a fully managed hosting environment. But they come with a subscription fee.
When evaluating wiki platforms, key factors to consider include:
- Ease of use for both technical and non-technical employees
- Permissions and access controls to keep information secure
- Availability of rich-text WYSIWYG editing vs Markdown
- Search functionality to quickly surface relevant pages
- Integrations with tools your team already uses like Slack
- Mobile app or responsive design for on-the-go access
- Ability to handle different media types beyond just text
- Version history and audit logs to track changes
For most teams and growing businesses, a SaaS wiki platform offers the best balance of power and convenience. The monthly cost is easily outweighed by the efficiency and productivity gains. But standalone software can work great for more tech-savvy teams that want full control.
Step 2: Create a Wiki Structure and Organization System
Once you‘ve selected your platform, it‘s time to think about how you want to structure and organize your wiki. The goal is to make it as intuitive as possible for employees to navigate to and find the information they need.
Start by identifying the high-level categories that naturally exist in your company such as departments (Marketing, Sales, Engineering, HR, etc), office locations, and/or major projects and products. These will form the basis of your wiki‘s hierarchy.
Under each main category you can add additional levels of subcategories as needed. So under Engineering you may have subcategories for each development team. Under Sales you may have subcategories for each stage of your sales process.
Tettra‘s wiki shows a clean example of organizing content by department:
[Include screenshot example of wiki categories from Tettra]In addition to the hierarchical categories, you‘ll also want to implement a tagging system to further classify pages and make them easier to find via search and filtering. Think of tags like the index in the back of a book.
For example, any page with information related to employee benefits could be tagged with "benefits" regardless of which category it lives under. A page describing a new feature launch could be tagged with the product name, "new feature", and "launch."
By using a combination of thoughtful categories and tags, employees will be able to quickly drill down or search to find exactly what they need vs getting lost in a sea of pages.
Step 3: Migrate Existing Knowledge Into Your Wiki
Now it‘s time to start filling your wiki with valuable content! The best place to begin is with existing documentation that‘s currently scattered across different folders, drives, and tools. Think company handbooks, process documents, FAQs, onboarding materials, meeting notes, etc.
Gather up all those dusty Google Docs, Word files, PDFs, PowerPoints, and the like, and import or recreate them as wiki pages under the relevant categories you set up. As you go through this process you‘ll likely identify opportunities to combine related information on a single page and prune anything outdated.
Going forward, make the wiki the go-to place for this type of evergreen company knowledge vs having it live in separate documents. Your wiki won‘t be very useful if it‘s not the canonical source of truth.
Step 4: Set Permissions and Train Your Team
Before you announce the wiki to the whole company, take some time to think through your permission structure and make sure sensitive information is properly access-controlled. Most wiki platforms allow you to set read and edit access at the page or category level.
For example, you may want the HR category to only be accessible to the HR team and executives. Or perhaps the Engineering docs should be read-only for non-technical employees to avoid accidental changes.
You should also consider having a small group of admins who can manage users, configure integrations, and make high-level structural changes to the wiki.
Once your permissions are set, it‘s time to introduce the wiki to your team! Schedule a company-wide training session to show employees how to access the wiki, find information, create and edit pages, and use the built-in communication features.
Make it clear that the wiki is now the central source of truth for company knowledge. Encourage employees to make checking the wiki a part of their daily routine, just like email or chat.
Remember that a wiki is only as valuable as the collective knowledge contributed to it. So be sure to recognize and reward employees who take the time to document and share what they know.
Step 5: Establish Wiki Guidelines and Best Practices
To keep your wiki in tip-top shape as more people use it, you‘ll want to put some Wiki Guidelines in place. These establish standards and best practices for things like:
- Naming conventions for pages and files
- How to use categories, tags and other metadata consistently
- When to create a new page vs adding to an existing one
- Style, formatting and voice to use when writing content
- How to effectively cross-link related pages
- Process for reviewing and approving new content
- Regularly auditing and archiving outdated pages
Your guidelines will evolve over time as you see what works and what doesn‘t. The key is striking a balance between maintaining consistency and not being so rigid that you discourage people from contributing.
One best practice that applies to all wikis is to assign Subject Matter Experts to own and curate the content for their functional area. So someone from Marketing owns the Marketing category, someone from Sales owns Sales, and so on.
These SMEs are responsible for ensuring their section of the wiki stays accurate, current and follows the guidelines. They can recruit other team members to help write and review content.
Another tip is to use your wiki‘s built-in templates and style options as much as possible vs designing your own. Let the wiki handle things like table of contents, standard headers, callout boxes, etc so everything stays consistent without extra effort.
Finally, make good use of your wiki‘s communication features to keep important pages on people‘s radar. Most wikis allow you to "watch" pages, mention team members, and see a feed of recent activity. You can also embed wiki pages in other places employees hang out like chat apps.
Ready, Set, Wiki!
We‘ve covered a lot of ground in this guide to business wikis. You now know what a wiki is, why they‘re an incredibly powerful tool for organizations, and the key steps to create and maintain one for your company.
The only thing left to do is get started! Remember, your wiki doesn‘t have to be perfect from day one. It‘s an ever-evolving knowledge base that will grow and improve over time as more people use and contribute to it.
Think of your wiki as a journey, not a destination. Enjoy the process of collaboratively documenting and sharing knowledge with your team. The efficiency and productivity gains you‘ll unlock along the way are well worth the effort.
Happy wiki-ing!
