An important goal of wiki management is deciding what to remove and what to keep. Although your wiki team might value everything it created, the difference between a usable wiki and a mess is sometimes unnecessary or poorly organized content. Often, fixing the problem is merely a matter of finding the right home for a few misplaced pages.

Another problem is wikis that might look like empty flower beds, waiting for content. Deciding what goes into these beds is one facet of the wiki manager’s job. Encourage your team members to be bold, asking them to fill in the sparse spots and prune the dense spots. By encouraging your team to help in the pruning process, you ensure that their delicate sensibilities aren’t insulted by overindulgent page removal.

The deletion of data also depends on your office or community data retention policy. Even if no data retention policy exists governing your wiki, backups and version control systems that allow you to roll back to a previous version are still important. (See the section, “Rolling back changes,” later in this chapter.) Here are two ways to handle deleted or modified data:

A good wiki needs good people. A wiki without contributors who write content is just a hard disk. Your wiki also needs editors — also known as gardeners — to make corrections. Your initial passion and efforts are for naught if your merry band of wiki-teers gives up during the extensive management stage. That’s where the roles of manager and wiki champion become crucial.

Training your crack team of wiki-teers is important both at the initial stages of the wiki as well as during regular intervals in the wiki’s life cycle. Wiki training usually happens on the job and as needed; you probably won’t conduct formal training courses. Instead, you should copy the sort of approach taken by Wikipedia, which has a community area where the roles and policies are clearly explained, as you can see later in this chapter.

Your training will have to address the fact that people take on new roles as they get more and more involved with a wiki. Read about the wiki life cycle that we mention in Chapter 1. As your wiki grows, create a page that describes what each role does:

Seeding the mysterious flame of community wikis

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, a book by cult favorite and erudite scholar Umberto Eco’s book, is considered one of the densest — and richest — novels ever to grace the page. There are thousands of literary and cultural references throughout, and it would take an army of grad students to unpack them. As a result, it has taken on a reputation as a scholarly curiosity.

Luckily, there are wikis. A group of Eco fans got together to write about the book and bring to light all the references and allusions. The result is a chapter-by-chapter wiki (as shown in the figure here), full of cross-references, outside links, and scholarship as diligent as Eco’s.

The way that this wiki grew is a lesson in wiki gardening. At first, a wiki page was created on one chapter, and then it was corrected and embellished until it was pretty much complete. Nothing much would happen until someone expanded the wiki to cover a new set of pages. The expansions would then get corrected and fixed by the community. The lesson is that the gardener might need to take the lead and create new flower beds so that the community can do the work of weeding them and filling them out.

If your wiki becomes stale, attempt to seed new content and add new kinds of pages. Writing about music? Add pages for each song on an album and flesh out those pages with cross-links and obsessively cataloged information. Keep things fresh. Expand from your original mission and add applicable information. Build another Wikipedia or even improve Wikipedia by adding your own hard-fought information.

Wikis are usually self-organizing. A small group of people acts as a management committee, but these people rarely tell each other what to do. The training documentation on most wikis is not a law to be enforced but is, rather, a guideline that shows how someone else approached the task. As time goes on, these guidelines might become well established and seem like laws — but they don’t start out that way.

Wikipedia has excellent models for such training content, as shown in Figure 12-1. This and other pages can be found at

 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page    

 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style       

 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_layout       

Figure 12-1. Basic instructions are an important part of any wiki.

Many wikis that use MediaWiki (the wiki engine on which Wikipedia is based) link to these pages as a way to provide training resources. After your wiki gains steam, though, your community will probably need its own pages to express local policies and habits. In addition to posting help pages, some other good training measures include the following:

The training should help people to train others not only in basic wiki skills, such as text formatting and creating links, but also in the wiki mindset and the values of wikis. Your trainees should become evangelists for putting wikis to work where they will succeed.

A good wiki tracks page versions so that you can easily roll back unwanted changes. This is one of the most important features of a wiki because it allows you to safely encourage users to be bold. A roll-back feature makes it easy to undo boldness when that boldness is ill advised. To roll back changes on your wiki, follow these basic steps:

Spamdexing is another name for commercially oriented vandalism. Spamdexers put advertisements or promotional links in wiki content designed to promote their products or to increase their page rank so they appear higher on search engines. Rolling back spam changes is the most basic way to combat spam, but there is often a long-term battle between the spammers and the spammees with constantly changing tactics. If your site starts to get spammed on a regular basis, read through these sites for the most current ways of combating spamdexing. Then, consult your Internet mechanic for help in implementing them:

Refactoring means restructuring. This term is often applied to computer code, but it also applies to design: taking something that’s awkward and turning it into something elegant; or changing it to make it work better.

Wikis are filled with content, much of which is text. You can refactor text in the ways that we describe earlier in this chapter: pruning, breaking large pages into smaller ones, and changing the structure.

More uniform structuring calls for a different type of refactoring that might involve code, as we describe in Chapter 14. Here is a brief introduction to using templates to structure wiki content.

Reinventing the wheel every time you create a new page makes no sense. Certain pages in your wiki start to take on similar forms and eventually become standardized in a template. Many wikis also have a way to put the same content on many different pages without creating new versions of that content. Keeping on top of when new templates or new reusable content must be created is an important task in managing a wiki.

In the world of word processing, a template is a shell document that you fill in. In the world of MediaWiki — the wiki engine that runs Wikipedia — template often means a link to some standard text that might be included in many different pages. See Chapters 6 and 8 for more on using MediaWiki-style templates. For the purposes of this chapter, a template is an empty page with a structure that you can fill in.

Templates simplify tasks and solve problems in many ways, including

Figure 12-4. Sometimes a template is simply a set of instructions for creating pages.

Chapter 14 provides details about creating your own wiki templates. With a little simple code, you can create templates that guide users to enter similar information. For example, a list of contact information is much easier to compile automatically if everyone enters the same information in the Contact form. (Chapter 14 also covers wiki magic like this.)

Daily tasks should be performed to ensure the integrity of the wiki. You won’t have to do them all every day. By paying attention to these tasks each day, though, you can see what needs to be done. (After all, if someone wants to use your wiki, you don’t want to make him wait for a week to get access!) Daily tasks should include

Some tasks don’t need to be done every day. They can be performed more infrequently, but they shouldn’t be ignored. Here are some tasks to attend to weekly to keep your wiki humming:

Once per month, take a step back and really assess how your wiki is doing. Monthly wiki tasks include the following:

Some tasks need to occur only once yearly. These often involve meetings, assessing the big picture, and having face-time with your team. Do not be afraid of the team! They are here to help. Annual tasks to conduct with your team include the following: