Wiki Basics
A Wiki is a set of pages editable by collaborators in your space. Using a wiki is almost as natural as using a blackboard in real time. No special knowledge of HTML is needed. The defining characteristic of cyn.in wikis is the ease with which such edits can be made by people without any technical knowledge. Every page in a wiki can be amended, edited, or even deleted by anyone with a web browser.
From a user's perspective, the mechanics are simple. Typically each wiki page in cyn.in, will have a set of links to:
- Switch from the View mode to an Edit mode
- Show the revision history of the current page - indicating the changes made to the wiki
- Add categories to make the wiki page more search-able
- Add Related Content to the wiki page
- Attach files to wiki pages
- Search the full text of all pages in the wiki
Wiki Usage
Wikis, due to their simplicity and flexible nature, can be easily used for applications like documentation, reporting, information management systems, project management, glossaries, dictionaries. Wikis facilitate collaborative creation, finding, shaping and sharing of knowledge.
Collaboratively build documentation
Wikis are mostly used in organizations for live information that constantly changes, such as documentation. The main benefit of a wiki is the ability to edit collaboratively in real time. For documentation, use the home page of the wiki to organize the structure of the documentation. In other words, maintain a table of contents on the home page of the wiki and link to pages where you write the actual content. Whats great about a wiki is that, if there is group working on the documentation, anyone can access and write the content while others can edit and update the content to get the documentation ready. Documentation is often more up-to-date and comprehensive than documentation that is written initially and left in a static form
Word document overload causes the most consternation. The biggest "aha!" comes when people realize that their documents in Word are a barrier to collaboration, and that the wiki provides a better solution than Word documents.
Tell people: "The ONLY time you should create a Word doc is if you want to insert an excel sheet inside the document. If not, put it on the wiki."
Replace Email collaboration with Wikis
If used frequently, wikis can drastically drop email volume and cut meeting times to half. Rather than emailing drafts of documents to multiple recipients and collating comments and changes, those same individuals can directly change the text in a single place where everyone else can see and provide feedback on each revision. Furthermore, each version is kept in the document's history and can be referred and even reverted to at any time.
Meeting Minutes
During each meeting, people can take notes as items are discussed, effectively taking meeting minutes right on the wiki. Instead of having one person responsible for minutes, have everyone contribute, You'll get a more accurate picture of what was discussed and decided and people will be compelled to keep using the wiki as they invest time and knowledge in it. Furthermore, this wiki can help your team make meetings shorter and more focused. How? By letting everyone track progress of projects and action items in cyn.in, they can focus meetings just on the items that need in-person discussions.
Project Management
Teams can use wikis to organize and work on critical documents and project plans. It lets people work more efficiently between face to face meetings and becomes a magnet for the most relevant information. Some action items are one off tasks, but most of the times they pertain to larger projects your group is working on. When you start to notice that you have groups of items related to these projects, create a page in your wiki for each project, then you can link to meeting agenda and minutes and other items related to those projects, also put other project related items on the wiki. Perhaps, documentation, project plans, elements of the project people are working collaboratively on - where you want to move collaboration away from email and attached word documents and so forth. Those are all natural things to add to project management pages. The best part is, once you start to do that, you develop a good amount of project management related content on your wiki, in future meeting agenda pages, you can easily link to those project pages, when you want people to take a look at something to be discussed in the meeting or just get an update on the status of a particular project.
Structuring your Wiki
To start with, the Wiki home page is a place where people first land and get an idea of the goal of the wiki, what are you trying to achieve and how you are going to put the information together in the wiki itself. This helps as people know what they are expected to do here. Each space should have a wiki start page.
Focus
A wiki needs to be about something to be successful. It needs to appeal to the space that isn't entirely satisfied elsewhere and its main purpose is to share information. For example, some of the typical goals for a marketing wiki are to help the team to create marketing collateral and share similar experiences with a product. Information types that support these requirements can include examples, brochure content, competitive analysis, customer best practices, etc. The important rule of thumb is to establish and understand the goals for your wiki early on and implement it accordingly.
Start with structure
Wikis are organized in a bottom up manner. The content that goes in the wiki has a need to be shared. Therefore the structure does tend to define itself over time. Once your wiki has enough content, you can look at what is being posted and let that drive a more formal structure.
Plant the seeds
It's important to seed a wiki to get everyone started. Start with a loose structure and modify content over time to define how the wiki is organized. Encourage contributors to add their own content areas and determine how to tie the content together structurally once you understand what the community is talking about.
Regular reviews
Make sure the wiki content is current and correct. Although this should be done by the wiki users, it's important to have a small group of people (wiki owners), including the moderator, who does this on a regular basis. A wiki with updated and correct information will continue to grow and prosper. When the site is reviewed for content, it is also a good time to look at the wiki structure and ensure the most interesting and useful content is easy to access
Content is king
Adding useful content to a wiki should always be one of the main purposes of a wiki. Users should be encouraged to add information without worrying about making it perfect or polished. Don't consider a wiki to be the next great novel or a technical writing masterpiece. Start with a loose structure and modify content over time to define how the wiki is organized. The bottom line is to help others solve a problem or better understand an issue. If your information does that, then you've succeeded.
