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Tag Archive: design


When dealing with a wiki, longevity is key! I've made that point already, but I'll continue reiterating it so that it is sure to sink in. Each page you create in the short term is another step down the long term road. As your wiki grows, you need to make sure that it doesn't fall short in: content quality, content accuracy, and content organization. One might even call those the three Cs of a wiki – perhaps I will at a later date.

So clearly, one of our primary objectives is to keep a wiki maintainable, so that we can provide it with longevity. One of the simplest ways of keeping a wiki maintainable is making everything organized and easy to find. Nothing can truly be "lost" (as in, become unable to be found), because you can always find uncategorized pages. However, when a wiki user is caught up in the moment, it can be quite easy to get lost or find difficulty in locating certain pages or content.

When designing your wiki, you were advised to think about the following question:

  • What categories will be derived from the wiki's overall subject matter?

In short, this means that you would've identified the overall topic of the wiki, and then would've derived from it, certain categories to be used for organizing sections (no matter how large or small) and pages of the wiki.

Different wiki software has different markup, but in MediaWiki you can very easily categorize a page by appending the following to it:

[[Category: Name of the Category]]

I recommend prepending this to the top, or appending it to the bottom of the article's wiki code. Depending on your theme, the category will be shown at the top or bottom of the page once saved, but that will happen regardless of where the categories are positioned in the wiki markup, so it's more sensible to put them at the top or bottom so that they're out of the way of everything else and not scattered about randomly.

The result on the page would look something like this:

Category: Name of the Category

You can add as many categories as you would like, as follows:

[[Category: Mercedes-Benz]]
[[Category: M-Class]]
[[Category: M 2010]]

The result will be:

Category: Mercedes-Benz M-Class M 2010

Categorization is perhaps one of the most important initial steps towards properly organizing pages on your wiki, and it's so simple that there's never a reason not to do it. Keep in mind that those categories will show up red until they are clicked on and a page is created to explain a given category. However, they will function properly even if you never create the category pages for them.

The first thing you need to do in your endeavor to implement a wiki is to design it. This is perhaps the single most important step in the early stages of your wiki's development. Whether you perform this step before/after installing a wiki software is up to you, but you should design before you start creating pages and populating your wiki with content. When I say "design," I am referring to the structure and organization of the wiki, not the cosmetic appeal.

Here are some topics to think about and questions you should ask yourself:

  • What is the purpose of the wiki?
  • How many contributors are expected to be collaborating on the wiki?
  • How often do you expect contributions to be made?
  • How much time (on average) do you expect each contributor will spend browsing and editing?
  • What categories will be derived from the wiki's overall subject matter?
  • What naming conventions will be most appropriate for articles and categories?
  • Will any articles of a certain category contain repetitive information with only details varying?
  • What will be the easiest-to-read format for the content of articles of a specific category?
  • What will be the easiest-to-edit format for the wiki code?
  • How long could the wiki be expected to be used?
  • How large could the wiki be expected to grow over the time it is expected to be used?

It should be duly noted that longevity is key when designing a wiki. If you aren't thinking about longevity when designing your wiki, you're going to stumble later on and realize that your wiki's longevity may be very short.

A wiki doesn't do things for you. Rather, it provides you with a clean, fast, and presentable means of storing information and documentation. That being said, you want to develop the wiki in such a manner that it will be easy to maintain down the road. For instance, you don't want to end up having to reorganize or rewrite loads of entire articles five months down the road. That would certainly be time wasted.

So be sure to plan ahead! Think long term – do your best to forecast the future of the wiki, even if you may doubt its fruition. Design and develop in manners that provide your wiki with longevity!

A wiki is a database-driven web application that provides a project, community, or other organization with a collaborative environment in which many contributors can author, edit, and organize content.

The most prominent example of a wiki would be Wikipedia.org, which is a project sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization responsible for the managing of various wiki projects and developing the MediaWiki software that powers them. Wikipedia is an OpenWeb Encyclopedia that you probably already use at least once a week if not once a day – and if you've never visited Wikipedia in your lifetime, I'd be so surprised that I wouldn't know where to begin. Wikipedia is quite a solid and perhaps overwhelming demonstration of a collaborative environment. However, Wikipedia primarily showcases the function of wikis as encyclopedic works. In practice, wikis can serve a variety of purposes. You can document designs, product/project information, policies, and much more.

In particular, I've used wikis for documenting information for open source software projects, game designing, and existing game documentation. That's hardly scratching the surface, however. Wikis can be useful to commercial and noncommercial organizations alike, and can be internal or external. I've consulted with a few LinkedIn connections of mine on designing, developing, adopting, and implementing internal wikis for government organizations, such as the US Census Bureau.

If you're in search of a medium with which you can quickly and easily produce and store content while maintaining a well-formatted presentation of such content, then a wiki may very well be right for you. You should note however, that if you wish to embark on the journey of getting a wiki adopted and implemented then you must prepare yourself to properly design and maintain a wiki over the course of its short term and long term development. It is my hope that the advice I offer on this blog will assist you in this endeavor.