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.
Test Your Wiki With a Limited Group
You should pilot test the wiki with a limited group of users and ask for feedback.
If a marketing team creates a wiki, its members should ask for feedback from colleagues in sales, for example. Other departments might not contribute content to the wiki, but they will benefit from the information available there, so get their feedback. If your wiki will be kept within your department, make sure you have a conversation with employees who will want to use or contribute to it.
Brainard notes that small teams or groups in a company will often bypass IT and start with a wiki appliance or hosted service. If they decide to deploy it enterprisewide, they then involve IT, and integration with current infrastructure becomes more important.
IT executives and managers should keep their ears open about what departments are experimenting with wikis so they know what services they might be called on to support. In many cases, though, a team will create a wiki for itself, and IT won't need to be involved in its creation, launch or support.
Pitfall to avoid: If you are going to the trouble of starting with a small group, don't brush off the group's feedback; it's valuable to the future success of your wiki. Incorporate the comments into the structure and setup of the wiki.
Promote Your New Wiki: Celebrate, Publicize, Share
Make everyone who might benefit from using the wiki aware that it's available to them.
Executives should mention it in their communication with the company, whether that's via e-mail or newsletter, or at company meetings. A wiki is meant to be used, and it should also be a collection of articles and information that is changing and growing and shifting to meet the needs of its users. Brainard says that executives could even use the wiki to publish blog content for employees to read as a way to increase visibility and adoption of the wiki.
Pitfall to avoid: Keep an active wiki. Revisit it often. When companies or departments see their wiki stagnating, "it's often the result of a poorly defined focus or a bad structure," says Brainard. "Or people aren't maintaining it."
