Michael Idinopolous suggests 3 ways to build a participatory knowledgebase using a wiki:

1. Structure by Topic

The whole point of the wiki is its ability to bring people together and connect dots across organizational silos. That won’t happen if you structure the wiki around those very silos.

Here, he argues the wiki shouldn’t mimic the existing organizational structure because that won’t help break down information silos.

I agree with the principle of using the wiki to encourage new connections across the organization, but it does need to start with some resemblance of the existing organizational structure. That gives people confidence in using it.

Here’s what I advise organizations:

1. Create spaces that reflect existing groups, teams, and departments (Sales, Marketing, Research, Product #1, Product #2, etc.) but keep all those spaces open to everyone in the organization.
2. When you add new content to a space, ask yourself: can this information be accessible to everyone or does it need to be restricted to specific people?
3. This way, you build a wiki that’s mostly open and encourages self-sufficient access to knowledge & cross-collaboration, but also preserves the security and privacy of sensitive information (and makes it easy to ease that privacy when you’re ready to make certain information more public).

2. Lead with what you want

…a page called “Trends in Retail Channel Marketing” is a better wiki page than “2006 Analysis of our Company’s Channel Marketing Spend”. (Of course, the report might be useful as backup–so include it as a link from the main page on trends).

Here, he’s suggesting that it’s not very useful to just use the wiki as a dumping ground for content that’s idle. It’s better to actively develop the information – say, for a research report – right on the wiki, then attached the final report to the wiki page. That way, people get both the content in a reusable form, and the report in an archival form, and both are in context by being presented together.

Also, when people actively create information on the wiki, they’re more likely to reuse that information where appropriate since they

• a) wrote it, so they know what it contains
• b) will likely write future information on the wiki, and will be in the mindset to recognize that they already have relevant content elsewhere on the wiki.

3. Link, Link, Link

Encourage them to “linkify” any term (yes, I mean any term) in their entries that is either proprietary vocabulary, potentially unclear to some readers, or describes a strategic concept where the company might have proprietary insights.

I generally agree with this one, although I think it’s good to exercise judgment about how many terms to link. It’s good to link to definitions of ambiguous terms, but it’s better to replace those terms with clearer ones that require less definition. That way, you can focus on making your core text as readable as possible, and focus your linking on terms you want your readers to focus on.