--- title: "Some Wiki Basics (Wikis)" date: 2012-06-13 description: "My journey to and from wikis 1.0 My Journey To and From Wikis: Why I Adopted Wikis, Why..." canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2012/06/13/some-wiki-basics-wikis/ --- # Some Wiki Basics (Wikis) There are more than 100 types of wikis (see the [wiki matrix](https://www.wikimatrix.org/)), though only a handful are worth considering. [Confluence](http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/overview) is probably the wiki most suited to documentation purposes, but our organization already had a couple of wiki platforms available: [SharePoint](http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/default.aspx) and [Mediawiki](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki). (SharePoint for internal infrastructure, Mediawiki for community collaboration.) I've tried both, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. Regardless of the wiki platform, most wikis more or less have a similar set of features. I'll talk briefly about a dozen wiki features in the context of Mediawiki, which is the same wiki platform that [Wikipedia](https://wikipedia.org) runs on. Mediawiki is open source wiki software, and widely used across the Internet. You can[install Mediawiki](https://idratherbewriting.com/2007/06/14/installing-mediawiki-is-much-easier-than-the-instructions-suggest-my-quick-10-step-tutorial-for-installing-mediawiki/) yourself in about five minutes. When you work with wikis, here are some things you'll find different from authoring with regular help authoring tools: - Content ownership - User pages - Authoritative content - Recent Changes - Discussion Pages - Everything on One Site - Wiki Syntax - Translation - Content re-use - Managing Content - Categories I'll briefly explain each of these features before diving into the more important topic of community collaboration. ### Content Ownership No one truly owns the content on a wiki. Typically you “watch” pages that you're interested in. For example, if you published documentation on the ACME widget, you would most likely watch all of the ACME widget pages. If someone makes a change you don't like, you can undo the change. Some wikis have a built-in workflow that forces revisions into a review state before the edits are live. However, most wikis try to avoid this publishing bottleneck and work on a model of trust. Most of the time, the edits are beneficial so we allow them by default. No one owns the content, so no one should enforce restrictions on editing the content. Community ownership sounds ideal, but it has some drawbacks. Mainly, it's easy for someone to create pages based on a current need, and then completely neglect the page when updates are needed. For example, let's say you currently have a project and you need to get some information out about it for others who are participating. The wiki works great for this, as it allows quick and easy publishing. It's almost an adrenaline rush to see your content published so quickly. Everyone can access and edit it, and it seems like a winning situation all around. Then the project ends, and you no longer have a need for the content. Rather than go through and delete the content, as well as any links pointing into the content, it's much easier to simply abandon those wiki pages, because after all, you don't specifically own them anymore; they're on a wiki, so the community owns them. For example, a few years ago I wrote a lengthy quick start guide for WordPress. I published it on the WordPress Codex here: [WordPress Quick Start Guide](http://codex.wordpress.org/index.php?title=WordPress_Quick_Start_Guide). ![My now out-of-date WordPress Quick Start Guide](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/wp-quickstartguide-600x457.png) Who actually owns the content? Although I originally wrote it, I contributed it with a [Creative Commons license](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/) so I no longer own it. At first, it was cool to see my content available in a public setting. I didn't need to get any permission ahead of time. It was just up and available as soon as I published the page. But then WordPress came out with a new version, and another new version. I didn't bother to update the original content to match the later versions of WordPress. Eventually the content became out of date. Some people edited some parts of my WordPress Quick Start Guide, but with no one really invested in it, with no true ownership of the content, no one felt a responsibility to update all the content to keep it current. The lack of ownership can lead to many wiki pages being out of date. Many times a wiki has so many pages, it's hard to tell who authored what, and whether the pages are still needed, or whether they're up to date. Although community ownership is a neat ideal, ultimately each wiki should have a chief content owner, someone who is dedicated to the site as a whole and keeps a close eye on all the content assets. Without dedicated managers to review and update the content, wikis can quickly expand into bloated, outdated content messes. On the flip side, when the community owns the content, community members can also keep content up to date when the original author flounders. Many times the original author isn't aware of all the places that content is out of date. As community members use the documentation, they often find places that need updating. Because the content is on a wiki, they can quickly and easily make these updates. Withdrawing from tight control and ownership is a hard transition for many to make. One of the writers in another department at my work uses our wiki to publish some documentation. At the top of the documentation he added a note asking that no one delete or edit the content on the page, since it's *official* documentation. I think he doesn't really agree with the underlying philosophy of a wiki. That philosophy is this: When you publish content on a wiki, it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the community. Others can update the content as much as they want, without feeling that they are infringing on your content. It's not as if others are opening a file on your computer and making unsolicited edits. Instead, the content is owned by everyone, and everyone has a right to edit it. ![Wikis have shared ownership. No single person owns the content -- everyone does.](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/shared-ownership600.png) ### User Pages Because everyone can be making edits, it's important to track who makes edits to which pages and when. With Mediawiki, each user has a “user page.” When you make an edit, the page has a version history showing the user names of each user who made changes to the page. Each user name links to the user page. Go to any Wikipedia page (such as the [Technical communication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_communication) page) and click the [View history](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Technical_communication&action=history) link. You will see a list of all the users who made changes to the page. If the user doesn't have a user page (because the user never logged in and created an account), the version history shows the user's IP address. You can usually click the user page to read a little bit more about the user. ![The View History link on the Tech Comm Wikipedia page](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/view-history-600x386.png) From the user page on a Mediawiki site, click the **User contributions** link in the sidebar to see other edits the user has made on the wiki. You can also click the **E-mail this user **link to send an e-mail to the user through the wiki interface. ![User Contributions and Email this User links](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/user-contributions-and-email-this-user-600x388.png) A lot of times, if you're unsure about the edits someone is making, you can assess the person's authority and credibility from his or her user page. The history of a page also lays bare all the people who contributed to the content, so you can read about the people who shaped the page's information. As you look through the history of a page, you can see how many characters someone added or removed. A lot of times, edits are trivial, correcting a misspelled word or adding a missing word. When you see that someone has added 1,000 characters or more, the edits are more significant. In my experience, 90% of the edits are minor, such as adding a comma or capitalizing a word. Rarely do people make extensive edits. Writing is a lot of work, after all. ### Authoritative Content As I've worked with project managers to sell them on the idea of a wiki for documentation, many balk at the idea of giving users the ability to edit content. They feel users might introduce errors, communicate points poorly, and in general lower the authoritative quality of the content. I've heard some users ask how they can know what content is official and what content originates from the community. With wikis, users may be left to wonder about the source of policies, procedures, and other material. Do they come from the company, or other users? Companies give up some of this authority when they move to a wiki.