Wiki gardening

Wiki gardening tips

A wiki is a place where people gather to collaborate. Like a meeting room or a living room, it gets cluttered after a little while. Another common metaphor is a garden, which gets overgrown without regular tending.

Spending small amounts of time gardening on a regular basis helps to make your wiki easy to navigate and a pleasant place to work.

Here are some techniques to use when you have some spare quality time to spend with the wiki. Add yours!

• Pick some pages and clean them up -- correct misspellings, collect and condense comments, regularize the way lists or comments are formatted.
• When you are working on a topic, find the relevant pages and make an index of those pages. These finder's aids are a long tradition in archives management where you need to quickly get to a few relevant documents mixed in with a large quantity of routine correspondence.
• Add links from the home page to often-used index pages
• Condense discussion into a statement of the end result, and add a link to the original discussion. See gardening, which was merged into this page.
• Break long pages into meaningful sub-pages. Add links to the sub-pages from a main page.
• Add existing pages to appropriate categories.
• If you have old pages that you are no longer finding useful, make a link near the top of them to new pages that have more relevant information on the subject.
• Remove obsolete material. Create linked archive pages if the material is useful
• Everyone on the team can participate in continuous improvement. Depending on the structure of your team, it may make sense for one person to have special responsibility for maintaining a set of pages. Or it may make sense to have a designated gardener.
• Gardening is most effective when it's done a bit at a time. Team members can take responsibility for making something they are working on more useful for everyone.
• Please see research papers for more details and info.

source: http://www.eu.socialtext.net/exchange/index.cgi?wiki_gardening_tips