Today, every other person using the internet is familiar with the fantastic knowledge hub called Wikipedia. The word “wiki” immediately turns your mind towards Wikipedia. People worldwide use it to acquire updated information about various topics.
Recently, both individuals and companies have adopted the trend of creating a wiki of their own. With a private wiki, knowledge sharing with employees has become relatively easy for any business. This helps businesses to store documentation and share it with the workforce which facilitates effective learning and training of employees.
Studies have shown that an employee spends around 9.3 hours/week looking for the information to help him do his job. A private wiki that is up-to-date and user-friendly avoids time wastage of your team and improves business proficiency. The main thing that worries most businesses is how to create a private wiki.
This article will cover;
- What is a Wiki and How Does it Work?
- What are the Types of Wiki?
- What is Private Wiki?
- What are the Key Advantages of a Private Wiki?
- How To Make a Private Wiki?
- Primary Features to Look in a Private Wiki Software
What is a Wiki and How does it Work?
You can define a wiki as a centralized repository or pool of knowledge maintained by multiple users collectively. It is a kind of knowledge management system (KMS) that allows people to find whatever information is needed.
With the wiki, storing information, searching it online, and working collaboratively as a team is quick, easy, and efficient. You can create and edit your wiki if you have access to the wiki software.
A typical wiki may contain numerous pages on a particular subject. You can create a wiki that is accessible to the public.
According to a study conducted by McKinsey, employees spend 19% of their time looking for information to do their jobs.
In businesses, wikis bring different teams together and take less time training the workforce on business policies, employee guides, etc. Navigating thorough information is accessible on the wiki as information is organized in categories and subcategories.
Before we discuss how to make a private wiki, let’s first explore its types so you can proceed according to your needs.
What are the Types of Wikis?
Private Wiki
A private wiki is created to store a company’s internal information. This knowledge base can be for specific teams or the whole company. Private wiki holds business policies and procedures, projects and workflows, internal working processes, HR procedures, guidelines, etc.
If you want to see for yourself how a shareble wiki can help your business, you can create your first wiki on Waybook today, from dozens of beautiful pre-populated templates.
Public Wiki
A public wiki is also a resource hub, resource center, or an external wiki. Here, everybody can develop content and edit it. It allows your existing users to dig into your products and services quickly and helps them find solutions to their problems without contacting customer support. Some popular public wikis include Wikipedia, WikiTravel, and Scholarpedia.
Personal Wiki
You use a personal wiki if you want to organize personal documents, notes, or projects. For instance, you may use a note application on your cell phone or Google drive to save files. You require personal wikis to remain productive in your everyday dealings.
What is a Private Wiki?
As mentioned earlier, a private wiki is a centralized knowledge hub where you can store critical business information securely. This type of wiki is accessible only to the company’s employees through a login id, unlike a public wiki like Wikipedia. The employees can log in to this online platform whenever they want and from anywhere.
In a private wiki, you can organize and share internal information, which includes:
- Organization’s vision, mission, culture, and values
- Work policies and procedures
- Code of conduct
- HR policies and SOPs
- Clients and project workflows
- Training materials
- FAQs, tutorials, and guides
A private wiki enables teams to work collectively, give reviews, and update content online. This makes a private wiki the only reliable information source in your company that covers all the crucial topics.
What are the Key Advantages of a Private Wiki?
- Quick And Better Decisions: Since employees can access the correct information instantly, they can make quick and better decisions in their daily business dealings. They become independent and are not relying on other personnel to guide them. This also enhances their confidence in making judgments and conclusions.
- Enhances Team Collaboration: In a private wiki, knowledge sharing becomes easy. Individuals collaborate with other team members and share their expertise, experiences, and feedback. This promotes knowledge circulation and benefits everyone.
- Automation Of Employee Onboarding: As per Glassdoor, it takes around 24 days and $4000 to find a potential employee in the U.S. This is a lot of money and time that nobody would like to waste. A private wiki helps the new employees to access essential information about the company’s work culture and policies. In this way, they no longer rely on their fellow workers to answer their queries. This increases their learning process and avoids confusion and repetitive questions.
- Promotes Knowledge Retention: Employees serving your company gain a significant amount of knowledge and expertise over time when they retire. A private wiki promotes documentation and retention of this valuable knowledge. This benefits both the current and future workforce.
Now, let’s get straight into how to make a private wiki in five simple steps;
How To Make a Private Wiki?
Setting up a private wiki is not at all a daunting task if you follow the easy steps mentioned below:
Step 1: Choose The Right Software
Complex and traditional wiki software is challenging to maintain. Choosing the right private wiki software is crucial because it avoids heavy resources and experienced developers for operation and maintenance. You should select a user-friendly wiki tool that offers an intuitive interface that even non-technical users find easy to operate.
Step 2: Designing Template
Wiki software comes with several built-in pre-designed templates. You can choose one by coordinating with your team. Templates save time by organizing content and allow you to format and style content as per your choice.
Step 3: Defining Workflow
To add documentation to the private wiki, you must follow a particular process. Designing and automating documentation workflow becomes easy with a workflow designer. Workflows may be divided into stages like draft, editorial review, final draft, and published.
Step 4: Adding Content
After setting up your workflows in the wiki, you can add the desired content. Post articles so that everybody in your company becomes aware of the type of content you are looking for. You can divide your content into categories HR policies, work procedures, SOPs, etc. Do not forget to add videos and images to your documentation to make it more appealing to your audience.
Step 5: Promoting Quick Search
You can promote quick search by interlinking related articles so that readers find detailed information and become highly engaged.
Primary Features to Look in a Private Wiki Software
Since numerous stakeholders use a company’s private wiki, you should ensure that it has the best features. These include:
- A private wiki software should promote real-time collaboration. This enables your team to edit a single file together. It should also allow you to add videos, images, link documents, etc.
- Your private wiki must have a content library that stores digital content, files, and images. Everybody in your team should have access to reuse the content.
- You should be able to develop interactive documents by embedding web links, cloud files, and media files.
- Your private wiki should enable everyone to search files quickly and the contents inside the file.
- A wiki must allow you to post an inline comment instantly without moving out of the document. This can happen when you need any help within the wiki.
- Allowing interlinking documents and files around different topics is also one of the prominent features of a good wiki. This makes knowledge sharing easy.
Conclusion
Sharing knowledge within a company, discussing ideas, and collaborating remotely is no more a hassle with a private wiki. One of the best private wiki page builders that you can rely on is WayBook. It offers an easy solution for content organization and knowledge management with outstanding features that get your work done effectively. So, try out Waybook today, and create a superb private wiki page for your company in no time.
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