Why do you need a wiki?
Wiki means “fast” in Hawaiian. A wiki is an open knowledge database that can be maintained and quickly expanded by all users. A wiki makes it possible to easily collect and make available the knowledge of an entire organization or company.
When setting up a wiki, it is important that there is a standardized layout for the articles, a sophisticated search and a clustering of the articles by topic in order to prepare the information for the users in the best possible way. Another way is to consult with a SharePoint development company.
In the following text, we would like to show you how you can create a SharePoint Wiki in simple steps.
What wiki options does SharePoint offer?
There are basically two alternatives, the Wiki App and Standard Pages, for creating a wiki in SharePoint.
SharePoint Wiki App – the standard from the old days
Microsoft already offered users a dedicated wiki app for SharePoint 2013. This app creates a separate and system-managing container with all wiki pages within the SharePoint space. Therefore, no separate SharePoint pages are created that can be made available elsewhere.
The SharePoint Wiki App has come of age a bit, but it is still supported in SharePoint online and the newer SharePoint servers. It should be noted that no adaptation to the new SharePoint design was made. Therefore, the display of the pages is based on the old user interface.
If you need an easy-to-use wiki, ideal for small volumes, the app is still excellent.
The creation of the SharePoint wiki via the app is very easy since the app is available in the standard catalogue. It can be professionally done if you consult with a SharePoint development company.
The procedure is as follows:
- Click New on the home page and then click App
- In the gallery, choose Wiki Pages Library and give your wiki a name
The newly created wiki already has a start page and other help pages. You can see that the design is very minimalistic. Unfortunately, there is no way to edit the template for new pages in the app. The wiki app focuses on the pure provision of knowledge without further design content.
A very big advantage of the SharePoint Wiki App is the easy creation of additional pages.
A simple code in the text is sufficient to create new pages. As soon as you want to insert a link to a new or existing page, it is sufficient to enclose the link in two square brackets. [[wiki page]]
Now you get an overview of existing pages. If you do not select any of the pages already created, you will be asked the first time you access the link whether you want to create a new page with the name. If you don’t want the page name in your link, you can use a straight hyphen | [[Page|Link]] Enter a different link text.
As already described in the introduction, it is important for a wiki to be able to assign the posts to topics. This is also easy to solve within the app. If you do not want to hire any SharePoint development company then we try to explain how to do it yourself.
To do this, simply extend the link command with a slash / [[topic/wiki page]]. With this slanting line, you can also arrange for the new page to be created with other subtopics. It is important to know that each page can only be assigned to one topic or subtopic.
You can find an overview of all pages on a higher-level topic in the wiki folder structure. Since the wiki website is stored in the topic folder in the background, a wiki page can only belong to one parent topic.
If you want to create a larger knowledge database with more options, you can also do this using SharePoint pages. We would like to go into this in more detail in the next section.
SharePoint Online – what is possible without the Wiki App
Metadata information has also been available for the website library on a SharePoint site for some time. By making it easy to create templates and predefined search web parts, SharePoint online now offers everything you need to build a fast and user-friendly wiki. Below we show you the necessary steps.
First, you create a new communication page, which you can build step by step into a complete wiki.
Template for the website
The most important step is to create the template for the wiki entries.
The following points are important:
- Short Summary
- Synopsis
- Target group
- Overview of related topics or topic affiliation
Integrating the help text directly into the page has proven useful for the user. In this way, you can instruct the creator directly what he should enter in which web part in order to achieve a standard.
As with the “original” wiki app, it is important for the contributions that the linking between the individual pages is easy so that there is a large interweaving of the individual pages. SharePoint Online has also evolved for this purpose. By including the double square brackets [[ ]] you can create a direct link to another page.
In order to be able to assign and display the pages thematically, it is necessary to provide further meta-information about the page. We can determine which type and how many by creating additional columns with the defined metadata types in the website library.
Start or overview page
The start page of the SharePoint Wiki is very important so that the user can access the knowledge database.
In addition, you can create predefined searches that automatically display the latest articles on a specific topic and present them as tiles. It is important not to put all the information on the page at once, but to take the user by hand and guide him through the knowledge database with well-thought-out navigation.
Also Read About: Get The Most Out Of SharePoint With Our Consulting & Development Services
Conclusion
The Microsoft SharePoint Wiki App offers an easy start in the world of wikis. It is the optimal solution for a small knowledge database. As soon as a larger knowledge database is involved, the use of SharePoint pages with templates is the better alternative. Through the use of multiple metadata and the appealing and easy-to-create design, the SharePoint online pages are clearly preferable to the SharePoint Wiki pages.
Al Rafay Consulting is a team of professional SharePoint development services providers. If you feel the need for a consultation about any issue regarding the above-mentioned settings, feel free to contact me.
