3 ms·
The problem with wikis in organizations is that they are a bit too unstructured. When a company is small they are great, but they accumulate cruft, the people
by nickcw 6y ago
The problem with wikis in organizations is that they are a bit too unstructured.
When a company is small they are great, but they accumulate cruft, the people who wrote the pages leave, they get disorganized, no one knows where to put pages, no one can find anything, etc, etc.
So when you look up something in the wiki you don't know whether it is up to date or not. Maybe it contains a procedure written by the support staff which you need to follow when X happens but the developers have changed the subsystem so it is actively dangerous now?
As orgs grow and their data grows you need a more structured place to put it than a wiki (or the shared filestore for that matter, ewww). One day you'll have Compliance requiring that docs are kept up to date, organized properly and owned by somebody.
Eventually you'll end up using a more sophisticated tool like Confluence which can enforce ownership of pages, enforce structure, archive pages which aren't updated and generally tick the compliance boxes.
(The above my personal experience from growing a company from 0-50 staff ;-)
- richardwhiuk 6y agoThe problem is that the structure isn't one dimensional - it's n-dimensional (e.g. product, technology, lifecycle (dev/support)). And it's hard to structure anything that works on all of the axis that people want to view the information.