Tips for Making Wikis Actually Work

By Deane Barker

Using Wikis with software developers: Here’s some fantastic advice for where the wiki meets the road.  While wikis are the darlings of theory, getting them to actually work in practice can be tricky, often for purely social reasons rather than technical reasons.

I fell for the hype and installed a wiki for my team to use. But my wiki was ignored by pretty much everyone, and fell into disuse. Recently, I relaunched the wiki concept within my team, this time successfully. What changed?

A couple pieces of advice: push for WYSIWYG (or WIKIWYG, as it’s called for MediaWiki), and start by seeding the wiki with some existing documents so people have some content to wrap their heads around.

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