What a wiki is good for:

Last week I thought I had finished the status report template project I have been working on. I was asked to send the product out for final feedback from a group of project managers. I got a response from one PM (one that I did not get to interview) who had a lot of suggestions. I thought about her suggestions over the weekend and worried about whether I really knew enough to create the template and how my presentation planned for this morning would go. Yesterday, as I was vacuuming, I realized that of course I don’t know enough about managing this company’s projects. I am an information professional. They are the project managers. They know best what should be reported and how. The best thing that I can do is help them share and access this information.

Of course! Everyone clearly has thoughts on what works best and shares these thoughts with a certain degree of passion. I am going to put the templates, best practices documents, and everything else I am organizing into a wiki so that everyone can edit and update it. My work will be to organize everything in the best way possible and to encourage everyone to review and edit the content as needed and as things change. I decided to write a nice paragraph for the landing page of the project management wiki about how a wiki is a work in progress, and ask the executives that I presented to for their help in promoting a culture of editing, updating and owning their wiki. It went really well.

My next project is figuring out just how to organize this wiki. I’m weighing the pros and cons of long pages and minimal clicks against short, concise pages that risk being buried. I’m hoping to find some kind of a guidebook on wiki information architecture…