Maintenance

Wiki maintenance made easy

Hopefully, your wiki content grows quickly and your users are busy adding and editing content. The faster your wiki grows, the more it becomes necessary to ensure that both your wiki content and its organization meet the requirements of your wiki audience. After all, the hard work everyone has put into the wiki so far should be reflected adequately. Your users don't want to waste any time when looking for information about a particular topic.

Luckily, the search engine is powerful enough to find the best matches to a user's search term. So even if you are falling a little behind with your wiki maintenance, users should still find their way around the wiki. But you can do a lot to make the user experience even better.

If you are tasked with maintaining the usability and content quality of your wiki, there are several types of tools to help you with this task.

Permissions

Any user with edit rights can view the special pages that are relevant for wiki maintenance. An exception is the special page Quality management overview. This page lists all pages that are in draft or accepted status and requires reviewer rights. This page only has entries if the FlaggedRevs feature is activated for at least one namespace and the user has access to that namespace.

Content monitoring

The quality management tools make the life of a wiki maintaner much easier. All wiki users can take advantage of the built-in features such as the watchlist, reminders, page assignments and the review workflow, for example. This helps users to take ownership of the wiki content right from the beginning.This works well on a page-by-page level.

As users link, move and delete pages, it becomes necessary, however, to monitor these changes. Over time, some pages might become neglected and add to the outdated content on your wiki.

To keep your content fresh, you should regularly take advantage of the maintance pages of the wiki. The majority of these pages are part of MediaWiki and documented on MediaWiki.org. Use the searchbox on their website to find out more. Some maintance pages are exclusive to BlueSpice, such as WikiExplorer, Assignment management and Quality management overview.

Accessing the maintenance pages

To view the most important maintenance pages, switch to the Global actions navigation. This navigation contains the two menus Global actions and Management. Both menus contain useful links to the most common special pages. Click on Special pages to access the complete list of maintenance and reports pages: