Back
0%

Back

Adoption of Just Wiki

 

Use case

Just Wiki is a great tool to organize the knowledge of an organization. In the following, we outline how use Just Wiki to organize the most important general information within an organization. The information contained within such a company wiki usually includes:

  • Forms (e.g. travel, vacation)
  • Presentations (e.g. on company, products)
  • Corporate identity guidelines
  • Privacy policies
  • Safety provisions
  • …

Define authors

Creating a central knowledge base for the entire organization requires effort: It needs to be structured, created and maintained. That is why the first step is to define the authors who will consistently put in the work. Letting everybody do their thing will most likely results in too little knowledge being created and/or in redundancies, suboptimal structures and outdated pages. That is the major reason why most decentralized and “democratic” approaches of implementing a company wiki in organizations have failed in the past.

Create wiki pages

A great way of creating wiki pages is to think of them as questions and answer pages. People usually just type-in a search word (= question) and expect to find the information (= answer) that they were looking for. That is why most people get to Wikipedia after performing a Google search. Similarly, users of Just Social perform a search almost every time they are looking for something. Thus, a great way of creating wiki pages is to:

  • Create one wiki page for every popular search word
  • Fill the wiki pages with the information that answers the “question” in the mind of the user as shortly and efficiently as possible

That way, the users will find the information in the easiest and quickest way. In most cases, typing the first few letters of a search word will be enough: If there is a wiki page named like the search word, the wiki page will already appear in the suggestions.

Create wiki index

After defining the author(s) and creating a wiki page for every search word, step three is to create a wiki index page that lists all wiki pages in alphabetical and/or topical order - much like the index of a book. Such an index page serves two functions:

  • An index page provides an overview
    Since the wiki index conveniently lists all contents at a glance, it is a great way to browse the wiki in case the search was not successful.
  • An index page builds trust
    The mere existence of an index page greatly improves the overall trust of the users in the information contained in the entire wiki. This is because users take the index page as a validation that the information on the listed wiki pages is officially approved and accurate. By contrast, the lack of an index page often has the user wonder whether the pages they stumble upon are official and correct.

Wiki page content

When you start creating your company wiki, please keep in mind that less is more: Keep the content on the wiki pages as short as possible. Think hard about what information the user is looking for and what he or she needs to know – and leave out everything else if possible.

From the user’s perspective, having to read less saves time and effort which in turn also maximizes the chances that the user will come back next time. From the perspective of the company, saving time means saving money.

Consequently, every time before you add new information to a page, think about the costs (= time) of creating and updating that information versus the benefits of making that information available.

Number of wiki pages

Just as you need to optimize the amount of information on the wiki pages, you also need to optimize the number of total wiki pages: again, less may be more than you think.

One great way of building a wiki is to start with rather few pages that only contain the most important information. In many cases, the 80:20 rule applies: the most popular 20% of all wiki pages will cover 80% of all users’ needs.

After you have focused on creating these core pages, you can then determine what is still missing based on user feedback and search results. If nobody is searching for a piece of information, why invest the time to add and maintain it?

Wiki page design

Keep the design of the wiki pages as simple, as functional and as similar as possible. Think about it: Why is every page in Wikipedia structured in the same simple way? Why is there mostly only plain text and hardly any pictures, icons, menus etc.? The answer is simple: because the use case is knowledge and not entertainment.

People search the corporate wiki not because they want to spend time and/or be entertained. They rather want to find a piece of information as quickly as possible, such as a company presentation or a travel expense guideline. Thus, if you want to do them a favor, reduce page design and text to a minimum.

This will also build trust in the validity of the information as all knowledge driven contents are designed in a very minimalistic way: from Wikipedia to white papers to scientific publications. As a matter of fact, the more puristic the design, the higher is the (perceived) quality of the information.

This is another mistake (in addition to combining different use cases) frequently made with CMS-based intranets: People mistake the use case knowledge for entertainment. Instead of building a plain, efficient and trustworthy knowledge base, companies have invested lots of money in designing content pages with different styles, drop-down navigations and lots of pictures and icons – and then wonder why most people do not use the intranet at all (despite checking the menu of the cafeteria).

Attach files

Much of the knowledge of an organization is stored in files. When you create your corporate wiki, you often need to link to files such as presentations, forms, logos etc. There are two ways of doing this:

  • Upload the files to Just Drive 
    The benefit of uploading the files to Just Drive (and then link to the files from the wiki page) is that files and wiki are separated. Users can then either concentrate on reading the corporate wiki or go to Just Drive to comfortably upload and browse through the files.
  • Upload the files to the wiki page 
    The benefit of uploading the files directly to the wiki page is that the users only have to use one app. Moreover, you do not have to worry about the access rights of the files: All users who can see the wiki page will also be able to view the files since they are attached to the page.

If your corporate wiki contains mostly text and few files, then the first option works best: The complexity of having to use two apps then outweighs the small benefits of being able to handle the few files with Just Drive.

If your corporate wiki requires lots of files, you should store the files in Just Drive because that is what it is made for. As a matter of fact, some of our clients have all their knowledge in files and focus exclusively on using Just Drive to create their central knowledge base. This works pretty well because our full-text search runs through the contents of all files. Some customers additionally use Just Wiki to write a short description with links to the most important documents and folders in Just Drive.

In any case, you should avoid duplicating knowledge in files AND wiki pages: either put the information in a file OR on a wiki page, but not both. That way you avoid both extra work and confusing your users.

Usage

Most company wikis are only used occasionally, even if they are well structured and up-to-date. The reason lies in the nature of the use case: The knowledge stored in a company wiki is usually very general and only needed from time to time - with the exception of the menu of the cafeteria. This is a major reason why many wikis and CMS-based intranets have failed: The use case simply does not make people come back regularly so they never get used to it – and the system eventually dies out.

Therefore, it is very important to implement Just Social not just with Just Wiki but with other apps that support “harder” use cases. These will have people log-in everyday and thus also help sustain the usage of the Just Wiki.

Other use cases

So far, we have described how to use Just Wiki to create a company wiki. Nevertheless, Just Wiki can also support any other wiki-related use case such as documentations e.g. for IT systems, projects, quality management systems etc. Every one of these cases will be slightly different, yet many of the logics and principles above will still apply.