Why an internal wiki is important for a growing development team (or an entire company)

Posted by mkhairul - May 22, 2008 at 10:05:10 pm -

Categories: blog, rants

One of the things that I wished companies have is a Getting Started page in a wiki. As a reference and as a guide. So you don’t have to bother someone else if you forget about something (unless you’re just trying to start a conversation, which would lead to a RTFW).

If you’re not living in a rock for the past few years. Almost every software have a getting started page. Helps their users to get up and running. It is also essential in helping someone who just enters an alien (or slightly different) environment to get up to speed on the ways things are done.

For your information, wiki is also being used by companies such as Motorola (MOT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), IBM, eBay, and Nokia (NOK). Isn’t that reason enough to deploy a wiki in the company?

For a development team, wiki is the place where the team puts in all the best practices, pitfalls, post-mortems, AAR (After Action Reviews), code snippets, references, development environments, setting up the environments, and many more.

One of the challenges that may happen to someone trying to advocate the use of wiki is, "we already have a wiki, its in …", and when you looked at it, its some sort of project management cum collaboration software for some sort of methodology (agile). Great, we have this. We can use it on things that require it. But a stand-alone wiki is still important. It can do so much more than the bundled thing with little fuss (create new project, add users, permissions etc). For a wiki, I can set it so that only registered users can edit. Other than that, there’s so much plugin out there for it.

Nevertheless, here’s some points about the importance of a wiki:

• Gets new members up to speed with the development team.
  
• Teaches how to organize information, clearly. If its not clear, edit it to make it clearer.
• Encourages documentation, improves writing skill. Writing is a form of communication, by improving it, it may indirectly improves the way we code.

I’ve already set up a wiki for my own use. At first glance, a wiki without information is useless. After gradually adding in information, the usefulness & importance is undeniable. You’ll be referring back to it again and again. It is useless to try to argue with people who doesn’t understand its importance, and as a pioneer, you must use it for yourself. Do not tell, show! Add in information, bit by bit, organize it and people will flock to it, and use it for years to come.

And maybe, your name will be recorded and whispered throughout the office hours as the one who brings them enlightenment, the light, for I AM LEGEND! (or YOU ARE LEGEND!)

Let us not forget, Knowledge is power, Sharing is Empowering.

Currently I have only used Mediawiki, you can see here for Comparison of wiki software and choose from it.

1 Comment »

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1. My local dokuwiki contain 3++ years of accummulated information and I agree, it’s invaluable.

   Comment by k4ml — May 23, 2008 #

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