Wiki design maintenance

Discussion
1

Hey
My last company, and almost every company I’ve worked for apart from maybe SONY, had alot of problems with information sharing. They all had WIKI’s and a high labour turnover based on the nature of our industry.
I am pretty passionate about this having seen how much work a good, used wiki saves.
Even though we are a young organisation we should decide if we are going to be a wiki centered space.
If we are then I wonder if we could maintain a lean wiki with current information?

I often wondered at work, if I could answer the following questions then we would could probably be sure
we had a decent wiki

How many wikipages do we have now?
How many are out of date?
How many are redundant?
How many have been retired?
How many new members have been told about the wiki, how many have used it?
Is there an approved template/style for writing our wikis?

The stuff I talk about is a bit of a wishlist, but here are my two cents for problems I’ve encountered before and possible solutions

The problems I saw were probably obvious.

1 Either no template to write wiki pages, or template was bad or ignored by wiki writers

2 Out of date information

3 Lack of awareness of wiki

4 amazingly enough many wikis had awful search facilities

1 I don’t know how to write design good wikis but it’s easy enough to recognise one, when we go to a help page from
some of the big tech companies its often easy to identify where the relevant information is a page cos all the pages are consistent

2 Out of date information is a huge problem I’ve encountered. One solution is to have each individual wikipages owned by someone in the space. They are responsible for its update, there name appears on the page. If theres a problem with the page then they are responsible for fixing it. Every few months we swap pages. This means every few months I got to read a few new wikipages, It trains me up in something I might not yet know and also means page will be uptodate.
Also if people use a wikipage on their own or in an induction it would be great of they could validate it, give it a displayed timestamped approval, this could help the regular checking process.
This process could be used to retire pages as well, something which often never happens in wikis and is in my opinion very important

3 wikis could be used as training steps/tools for inductions. This would homogenize training regardless of who does the induction, and it would mean people would be aware of the importance of the our wiki.
I havent dont any inductions yet, so this might be being done.

4 i dont know how some of the wikis ive used didnt have good/basic search facility but they didn’t

2

Discourse isn’t really designed to be a wiki. Yes you can “wikify” a post, but by default it’s just a post and you get replies following it. You can’t link to other pages just by putting their titles in square brackets. You can’t easily revert to an earlier version. You can’t make tables (easily). You can’t get a table of contents. etc.

Right now, if you want a “standalone” wiki page you need to

  1. start the thread, then close it to new posts, then delete the “this thread was closed” post or
  2. start it in one of these categories: rules, tools, infrastructure
  • I’ve cobbled together some custom CSS in these categories to hide the Reply buttons and other things related to “threads”
  1. use the post edit tool to wikify the post

The Discourse devs do have plans for “wiki categories” which make these things happen by default. No ETA for that feature.

Note that we can have wiki templates but they’re on a per-category basis. Try starting a new thread in Tools and see what happens.

Search is pretty good. Go to Tools, click the search icon and tick “search the tools category”

That’s the technical business. As for the social problem of “nobody likes writing documentation” I’m as clueless as the next person.

1 Like
3

Good points.

4

I think discourse is working surprisingly well.

I’m dead against new systems now we’ve got what we’ve got. I’m battle weary: I’ve set up wikis and built Drupal community project websites. I have seen most forms of disfunction, decay and so on.

What I would seriously fight for, is if we’re going to renew the documentation effort in some way, is have a 1:1 relation with physical versions in the space. Might sound crazy, but I’m happy to talk it through - over a pint, in the space.

5

I agree with physical versions in the space.

We were just remembering yesterday that we used to write upcoming events and important notes on the blackboard. Let’s start doing that again too.

6

We should get a printer running.

7

I used to do it every Monday after work… Thats the problem, we’ve seen all of this fall to trustees in the past.

8

Yes, and throw away all the crap ones like the HP B&W Laser and the Dell one…

Can we just buy the toner for the big HP or throw it away, it’s been sitting around for ages, and my feeling is that we’re spending money on a printer that will break, as I’ve seen most of them get thrown out at work for this reason…

9

Ok, let’s buy toner. It’s a decent machine and deserves to print 1,000s of pages

10

Can we safely run the printers with the dust and moisture until Phase 2 has us sealed / Phase 1 sealed off?

11

Moisture is much better controlled now. Good point re: dust. Would be worth checking the insides for dust before firing it up.

12

We have the dehumidifier on. The tarp came down at the weekend…that can be fixed.

13

Well, printing is but one part. Possibly getting ahead of ourselves. If we’re talking having equivalents of the wiki documentation pages in the space, we’d need A4 holders, etc.

14

yep, tarp can go back up as soon as the first line of lining is in. Though there is a proposal for that wall to go up ASAP as well…

15

@tomnewsom " The Discourse devs do have plans for wiki categories which make these things happen by default. No ETA for that feature."

Would this look and feel like a wiki? would it have table of contents for pages, are there advantages in clarity to having a stand alone wiki, we can prob get free hosting pretty easy?

16

would it have formatting general formatting abaility like wikipedia etc, I think if we do go down a wiki route, then having an established template is important so people can digest each page easily

17

We used to have one. It was crap and barely anyone used it :smiley:

We’re currently keeping documentation on Discourse because it means you don’t have to visit multiple sites with multiple logins and different editors. #space:tools #space:rules and #space:infrastructure are our “wiki categories” have custom CSS to make things a bit more simple. You still have to manually wikify each article though.

Automatic anchor links for headers in a post are coming.
Automatic TOC should follow soon after (it’s much requested and should be trivial to make a plugin)

18

yeah, one worry is that alot of effort is put into a wiki but we never develop a culture of using it but I don’t know an alternative apart from word of mouth, but for an organisation with over 100 members, who will be there at different times, I think word of mouth is poor.

ok, the #space:tools entries look good and homogeneous, there’s some entries there like

https://discourse.southlondonmakerspace.org/t/pc-with-windows-xp-for-old-printers/1014/1

which look more like discussion then wiki.
ill read through the #space categories a bit more

19

Maybe a @librarians role could curate the wiki pages?

20

it will be alot to ask one or a even a few people as the wiki grows (i’m for a small as possible wiki but theres a chance we will have alot to wiki), in my opinion I think librarians are necessary and will be an important post generally if we develop a culture of using wikis.
However I still think the actual editing of wiki pages should be distributed among us all and that librarians act as a sort of overseer/Q.C’er.
How we distribute wiki page editing creating, I dunno, but if we run inductions for tools/space using their wiki pages it will help ensure quality/uniformity for inductions and will ensure they are kept up-to-date, it will also help wiki usage in general if they are seen to be used for inductions/hard copies are great as well. Maybe we could distribute ownership of wiki pages as well, with member names on pages, and with librarians just doing general QC