Tricks to make your Wiki work
March 20th, 2009
I was in several projects where we used Wikis for project documentation. I have found it worked best when
- the average page is max 2-3 A4 pages long
- the audience is rather technical (they need to deal with the wysiwyg /textile editors)
- one or two people are responsible for keeping the wiki fresh (removing dead links, marking outdated information, regular clean up and restructuring)
One good trick to keep the Wiki alive is to carefully edit the main pages. They introduce the Wiki and help the users navigate to the more detailed pages.
Control the tree and the main branches and the pages will grow like leaves. You should work on these top pages like a newspaper editor. Keep the content fresh, pay exceptional attention to layout, and rotate some news stories.
If
- your audience is not so technical (business analysts, non technical people) and
- the pages tend to be quite long,
- you need a lot of graphics and tables,
you can consider our MS Word based Wiki solution.
Wiki switches to MSWord and Open Office
March 1st, 2009
This would probably make a ’scary’ headline for many. A recent post over at Simon Goh’s blog made an interesting comparison on how editing a wiki and authoring a document differs. Simon correctly argues that following MSWord features hinders a widespread wiki adoption:
- Too much options to indicate changes:
- Comments
- Revisions
- Strikethrough
- Highlighting
- Any combination of the above
- No RSS
- A ‘document’ has an owner, so other people are less inclined to modify it.
I would add following topics:
- No easy ‘read’ feature
- No easy ’show history’ feature
- Cumbersome navigation between ‘wiki pages’, which could actually be ‘documents’.
Yet, wouldn’t we all want to combine the richer editing features with the community aspects of a Wiki. Of course, as we are building exactly this combination, we strongly believe in it.
Add comments on what stops MSWord users create the next Wikipedia.