Best practices for a successful enterprise wiki

Enterprise wikis are recognised for their simplicity of implementation and the place they give to collaboration and sharing within organisations.

Today, they are used for a wide range of purposes: knowledge management, technical and quality documentation management, internal collaborative tools, etc.

Although they have a very good reputation, especially thanks to Wikipedia, Mediawiki wikis are sometimes considered as aging, limited, and regularly opposed to platforms such as SharePoint, Confluence or corporate social networks. Yet, Mediawiki has major assets to facilitate the management and transmission of knowledge and know-how within organisations.

So, how do you get the most out of your Mediawiki site?

In the course of our work, we have identified several good practices to develop user engagement on a corporate wiki and ensure its success:

1. Provide an intuitive interface and a modern design

The latest versions of Mediawiki allow you to create a unique design, adapted to your organisation’s charter and aligned with the latest web browsing standards. This facilitates employee ownership and encourages contributions.

2. Make your wiki responsive

It is now impossible to do without a mobile version of your wiki. Your employees must be able to access content and contribute from their mobile devices.

3. Facilitate the exploration and search of content

Use tags to enrich your content and thus facilitate access and discovery of content. For one of our projects, for example, we have developed a visual explorer that allows content to be filtered by tag.

4. Stimulate contributions while promoting quality

Two features have completely changed the way people contribute to a wiki and are now essential:

• Visual editor: all your collaborators can contribute simply, without knowledge of the code, as they do on any office software. Our advice: for consistent, high-quality content, limit the number of fonts, colours and other formatting options in the editor configuration.
• Page templates: we recommend using templates to simplify the contribution on a wiki. These help with selecting keywords, pre-requirements, drag-and-drop media or tooltips. Templates guide your contributors and simplify content creation.

 

 

5. Animate the community and develop engagement


Use gamification features (badges, challenges, rewards), activate personal profiles, create user sub-communities through group use, promote direct messaging or page discussions.

6. Internationalise your wiki

Enable Mediawiki’s translation capabilities to make your wiki available in multiple languages. And benefit from a powerful translation engine with re-use of existing translations (translation memory).

7. Ensure the security of your wiki

Update your Mediawiki version regularly to benefit from all the security patches provided by the Wikimedia Security team and encrypt your data with HTTPS.

In a future article, we will go through the reasons why a company should use Mediawiki instead of a more expensive enterprise solution.