Organize Your Enterprise Wiki!

Why does the majority of wikis within organizations fail? The main point discussed in Michael Idinopulos's latest post on Transparent Office is that corporate wikis have become dumping grounds for research information, and have stepped away from its collaborative nature. Sure it provides somewhat useful information for employees, but this process eliminates connections and new insights shared between people. So how do we prevent the “dumping ground” phenomenon from occurring?

Michael’s advice is to change a wikis position from being supply-led to demand-led. As long as wikis are still driven by supply, an abundance of research information with no practical structure will continue to pour in. So here’s a simple four step process Michael provides us with to help organize corporate wikis:

1. Get a small group of core community members to whiteboard a high-level information architecture in the form of a few categories (not more than 4-8) and subcategories (not more than 1-2 levels deep)
2. Create a series of blank pages or "stubs" hyperlinked to reflect the category structure
3. Assign each category to an individual member of the group to flesh out
4. Reconvene in 1-2 weeks to review what everyone has done, share learnings, and revise the category structure

Follow these steps to ensure collaboration deprivation doesn’t happen to your enterprise wiki…