Our group wiki is one of the most visited websites - and here is why!
On our wiki culture
One of the first thing new members of our group are pointed to, is our wiki. It contains all kinds of useful information, mostly information specific to our group. You want to know how to setup mailbox of the group? You want to know which PCs have which hardware? You want to know the agenda for the next lab meeting? The wiki has you covered! In the following, I want to describe how our wiki and our “wiki culture” works, and why you might consider to start one for your research group.
Four years ago, our group did not have a central knowledge base, which meant that everyone was keeping their own notes and the knowledge internal to the group was shared in verbal conversations and for tasks, you need to do only once often the answer was: “Phew, I remember doing it, but don’t remember how”. So we started our wiki from scratch, in our case a new space in the university’s confluence. For us it was convenient, since it was immediately available, but the ideas presented here should work on any wiki software.
Our central guiding principles for working with the wiki, the basis of our “wiki culture” are:
- The wiki is the first stop in your search for group internal information
- If you think something should be described in the wiki, but isn’t, take the time to add it Both points are important to keep the wiki alive and in every members attention. Only with frequent interaction, missing or inaccurate information is recognized and fixed. Only with accurate and comprehensive information, the wiki is a useful tool to the group. Whenever someone asks me for something I think, it should be in the wiki, I asked them if they checked the wiki. Either they find the information or it is an opportunity to improve the wiki.
Over the time our wiki has grown and encompasses a number of different sections: For new users, information on getting access to all kinds of different services are provided in the Onboarding section. The vital information on how to request vacation or how to get your travel expenses reimbursed are described in the Administrative section. Infrastructure contains not only information on the hardware used by the group, but also how and where it is set up and things like shared printers and the list of rooms you need transponder permissions for. Resources and Software contain useful pieces of information from links to the PhD guidelines for cumulative dissertations to using ssh for forwarding ports from firewalled machines. Finally, we organize our meeting agendas and projects in the wiki. The agendas of the weekly meetings can be used to check what will be or has been discussed, to add own discussion points and check the schedule for upcoming talks. The projects subsections are the most individual pages. Most projects contain the project analysis plan (worth a blog post of its own), but often also include meeting notes, intermediate results or other important resources.
There are several things, one should keep an eye on, to keep the wiki alive: Outdated information is frustrating for other members, they’ll find the information they searched for only to find that it doesn’t work anymore. Whenever you find outdated information, make a comment or even better, try to update the page. As mentioned in the guiding principles, whenever you encounter missing information, try to find it yourself and add it or ping someone who you think should know it and tell them that it’s missing in the wiki. Another frequent source of frustration can be misplaced information or a bad structure. The Sections described above reflect the current organization of out wiki, but have been changed several times, due to the constant evolution of the contents. The structuring of sections and subsections should not be considered permanently fixed, but rather should be restructured, when information cannot be found where it has been expected. Sometimes, content is ambiguous with respect to the sections, links inside the wiki can help to alleviate this issue, while avoiding duplicated information.
With all this in mind, how would one write good wiki pages?
- Think about the content you want to add, in which (sub)section would you expect it with which title? If a similar page already exists, consider adding it to the existing page
- Personally, I prefer to write at the top a sentence shortly describing the purpose of this page and what should be found there. This can help others to understand the page better, be more confident to add content and finally improve the searchability.
- Put the most important information on the top. Repeat visitors want that and not all the context in an introduction
- Add below detailed explanations in case someone needs to understand it
- If you describe a process (e.g. travel reimbursement), remember to add all necessary contacts
- Do not repeat information. If information can be found in another wiki page or on the internet, just put a link to it. This makes it easier to keep everything up to date.
- Keep your article within the scope of the wiki. If you put information here, that no one expects here, no one will look here. Consider if there is a better way to disseminate this information.
- Finally, better write a stub article with one or two sentences, then none. It takes less than a minute to write “Run this command to achieve x on y…” and paste whatever you just found out and others will thank you
