How to Build Your Own Wikipedia
Wikis are useful business tools. With planning and some staff time, you can make your own online collection of useful articles, tailored to your organization's needs, to communicate about business processes, manage collective know-how and more.
Hire A Gardener for Your Wiki
Once you have parameters for what the wiki will accomplish, create a plan that details who will be responsible for what.
Someone has to be in charge. Brainard says that whoever is leading the effort needs to "get buy-in from key players to help set up the structure." Those core people will be "gardeners" who help the wiki grow, maintain it and help new users, says Brainard.
There may be five people who talk during the development stage of the wiki, and maybe they will all be administrators of the wiki once it launches. Assign just one or two people to the position of "gardener." Once the wiki is open to the entire company, the gardeners should keep a close eye on its expansion.
"Maintenance is critical," says library technologist Jessamyn West, who has created wikis, and describes herself as a happy end user of many wikis. "The person building the wiki needs an organizational sense of how to present the information or no one will be able to find anything."
Pitfall to avoid: You don't want your wiki to be just a dumping ground for information. A wiki is not meant only to be used for storage, it's meant to encourage conversations and dialogue, and to be a reference tool. The gardener should not be shy about pruning.
A random sampling of interesting public wikis:
• Wikipedia is the well-known user-generated encyclopedia.
• The World of Warcraft game has a wiki for its game-players.
• A public wiki for Jim Henson's Muppets.
• The WikiTravel guide.
• The rock band Nine Inch Nails posted a wiki about its new album.
• The television series Lost has two wikis: Lostpedia and The Lost Wikia.
• The Library Success wiki is a place for librarians to share best practices.
