Creating a Knowledge Database through a Wiki

Every business in every industry has one common problem: sharing and storing information in a way that is easily accessible for people to use and learn. In some cases this may be a challenge when training new employees, or in others it may be a case of trying to retain important knowledge when somebody from your company retires.

One option that many businesses have turned to is using wiki-style resources that employees can access and update themselves. This makes it easy to document everything from common processes to employee guidelines, all in a central location. In this case, the wiki would usually not be public and would be restricted to employees only, or even to select employees only.

Benefits

The benefit to having a wiki for any subject is that you get the knowledge and insight of multiple minds, and it is put into an easily digestible format that makes it easy for new users to learn and understand. Of course with public wikis, the information is not always valid or reliable, but for internal business wikis, it can be an extremely efficient way to disseminate information.

There are actually many features of wikis that can be helpful to a corporation, which include:

• Building a knowledgebase of information that can be easily imported

• Avoiding email overload by storing information that can easily be accessed by those with a relevant interest (such as project teams) rather than storing information as emails, or sending information to people who "might eventually" need it

• Organizing information in an easily searchable format

• Collaborating and building consensus as multiple people develop and add to wiki content

• Access rights to control information access

• Knowledge management, especially retaining important knowledge once an employee leaves or retires

From a marketing or consumer aspect, it is also a really powerful way to engage consumers by providing a crowd-sourced resource that provides very useful and detailed information with relatively little maintenance. For example, a popular wiki fansite for the video game World of Warcraft receives between 500,000 and 800,000 unique visits per month, and consists of details and information about the game that dedicated fans took the time to write and explain.

Similar niche wiki sites are popular for video games, music, movies, books, TV shows, and many other consumer products and events. In many cases, a wiki can be a more suitable format for providing information than using QA forums, and it allows "superfans" an outlet to share information and insights about your product that few other people might know. (For example, have you ever checked out the Star Trek Wiki, or the Star Wars Wiki?)

Why We Like Wikis

For us at Amadeus Consulting, we specialize in custom software programming, meaning that we work on a wide variety of systems, and have specialists and experts covering a wide range of technologies. For us, this can be challenging for training new employees or cross-training current employees, and so it is important to make that process as efficient as possible.

To help with this, we have created an internal wiki that documents all of our processes as well as provides many insights and innovations our talented developers have uncovered. It has become a "knowledge database" for all aspects of the company as employees add information and insights which can then be referenced by other members of the company. It is also helpful for sharing new ideas and new discoveries as developers find new coding tricks and methods for doing cool things.

In short, it becomes a valuable resource to us that no other company has.

Creating a Wiki

Creating a wiki for your company is actually fairly easy. Most wiki software is open source and free, though it may take some technical know-how to get it up and running correctly, so you may need help from your web development company. There are many different types of wiki software, all of which provide basically the same services, though some provide unique features that may be more important to your business (content controls, for example).

In most cases this will be hosted on an internal server or private website so that is accessible only to employees, although there are also many public wiki options as well. For many companies, fan sites, consumer sites, or other types of online applications, it makes a lot of sense to plan for a wiki when considering website development.

Of course with the case of a product site (in some situations) or a fan site, it makes a lot of sense to add a wiki-style platform as a way to engage users and quickly create comprehensive and valuable content.