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- one or two people are responsible for keeping the wiki fresh (removing dead links, marking outdated information, regular clean up and restructuring)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.