Why And How To Write A Corporate Wiki?

Build corporate wiki with easy team collaboration

Have you heard about the term “wiki”? I’m sure everybody has heard of this at some point or the other. But do you know what a corporate wiki is or how and why to write a corporate wiki? Let’s get started and understand the overall concept of a wiki, its uses and benefits and how to write a corporate wiki.

Earlier people, teams and groups shared information with each other through emails, making edits in it and then re-emailing the new or revised documents back to the whole group or team. But the main downside of this method is the fact that the changes or modifications being made cannot be seen by the group at the very same time. So, wiki is now used to keep the information managed and easily accessible to all.

What is a corporate wiki?
A corporate wiki is the source or hub of information which your employees can relate to for a variety of corporate tasks and processes. Indeed a wiki is the webpage which can be edited by many users or writers and can be done easily without any HTML code.

How to write an enterprise wiki?
So, when looking forward to write a corporate wiki, you need to keep in mind that the content should be of main details and information. This can include the history of the enterprise like when it was founded, its culture, products and services, financial performance etc. It is advisable that when writing the enterprise wiki, you do not link to other sources and web pages that are of less importance to your business.

What to keep in mind?
When writing an enterprise wiki, remove all jargon that may sound promotional. You don’t need to attract any customers from it, so keep it information rich and useful. Just strip down the content to a series of verifiable facts without passing any judgement or opinion.

You will be surprised to note that for a lot of companies, creating the corporate wiki seems to be a boring task. But companies need to understand the fact that wikis are a great way to let your employees have all information about your enterprise, its working, background, products etc.

Structuring your wiki
One of the haunting tasks when writing a wiki is to know what all details you will need to add in the document. You may start with asking questions at the readers like what they would like to know about the company etc. This can serve as the starting point of your wiki and can then evolve more organically as you move further.

• Who are the readers or people reading the wiki?
• Are they from different teams or different departments?
• What type of customers does our company have?
• What is the hierarchy at our organization?
• How is work allocated?
• What are the main clients and projects?
• How are priorities set and who sets them?
• What is the mode of communication between employees or same department and different departments?
• How different teams work together?
• Who to consult when things get stuck?
• What software tools does the company use?

Based on these questions and a lot more, you can structure your main outline of the corporate wiki. The structure is really important and in case the things are messy, people will not use it often. These questions are asked and duly answered imagining that the people might be curious about certain things.

Let’s understand this by taking an example. For instance a page which describes a department, team or responsibility may require including the following details:

• Who is responsible for the task?
• How are the priorities set?
• How does the team measure results/success?

Uses of a wiki
For the people in the company to refer to the wiki, it should be a hub of details where people should return to in order to get more details. For this to happen, it is important to keep the details in the wiki up to date and easy to read.

It is also important to have these basic things in the wiki including:

• Useful search option
• Structured home page

Changes to the wiki software are made in real time. They have better version control that allows you to easily revert to previous version in case some incorrect edits are made. It has been seen that a lot of companies make use of corporate wiki software to write the wikis. They also use wiki to facilitate the tech support. Actually it is like a discussion forum but structured and organized. Indeed, you can also put the wiki to work easily, either to be used alone, by a group or different teams.

Why writing a corporate wiki is so crucial?
The main reason behind writing a foolproof wiki is that it is used by employees, staff, management, clients and customers of the company. It is thus important to pay close attention to the wiki. The companies have now started shifting all their documentation to corporate wikis where not just the technical writers but the field technicians, engineers, managers and others can participate easily in knowledge sharing and creation. There are some companies as well that open their wikis to the end users as well so as to broaden the knowledge base. Thus in such an environment, the technical people shoulder the responsibility of editing etc.

Last but not least, one of the best uses of having a corporate wiki is to basically have an information hub of the company, its products, projects etc. The advantage of having a wiki on a topic like some project is that it is very simple to add as well as maintain new pieces of documentation that may not fit in the full blown project plan.

Summing it up
So, we hope that the above mentioned information may have helped you to better know about what a wiki is, how it is written and what its uses/benefits are. It is highly recommended that information or data is added/modified in the wiki by technical writers, employees, engineers, clients and customers so that updated, structured, detailed information is added in the corporate wiki.