Content organization

A guiding principle in a wiki environment is: All users can easily and immediately share their knowledge and collaborate on content. For this to happen, it is not necessarily important that users know how the wiki is organized.

Initially, a page can be created anywhere in the wiki, wherever a user has write access. It is, first of all, important that the information is shared. Where the resulting wiki page ultimately lives and how it is found does not have to be decided right away.

In practice, however, there are many relationships between the individual pages. In addition, there are often different target groups for different types of content.

Therefore, it is important for administrators to set up the wiki so that the content can be meaningfully organized. There are important areas to consider:

• User roles and permissions
• Elements for structuring content:
  • namespaces
  • categories
  • pages and subpages

The following is a simple example for content organization:

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To clarify how these wiki functions can be used efficiently for a single wiki or wiki farm, a content organization and management concept should be developed. Consider the following areas:

1. Content strategy:
   1. What types of content do you share on the wiki?
   2. Who creates which content?
   3. Is there a need for pre-structured content formats?
2. Information architecture
   1. How do I organize content, navigation paths and search capabilities to provide user-friendly access to existing information?
   2. Who has what kind of access to the content?
   3. What are the target groups for the different content areas?
3. Quality management
   1. Which content must be checked and by whom?
   2. Do you have content with a predefined life cycle?
   3. Is all content meaningfully categorized?

If you don't have a content strategy or an information architecture and ideas about quality management in place when setting up a new wiki, don't hesitate to start using the wiki. Collect and create content as soon as the wiki is technically available. Just make sure that data protection aspects are clarified in advance and communicated accordingly when sharing company information. Through the search function and various special pages, the content can easily be searched and retrieved.

As the content grows, administrators can take inventory and structure the content based on that information and determine policies, processes and the information architecture. The most important decisions should be written down in a formal governance document. From then on, content will be created and organized according to the policies, processes and architecture decisions that are specified in this document.