Search for wiki in wikipedia and you'll get the following:
A wiki is a collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone with access to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.
Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites...
Wikis are used in business to provide intranet and knowledge management systems.
Simply put, wikis in SharePoint pages that allow groups of people to share information and ideas on the fly in a quick and easy way. There are 2 ways to create wikis.
- Create a wiki site by going through the same process of creating a site and just selecting Wiki Site from your list of templates.
- Create a wiki page library.
It doesn't really matter which of these methods you choose. Method 1 will create a subsite with a Wiki Pages library that will contain your wikis. Method 2 will create a Wiki Pages library on the site that you're currently on. You may want to use the 1st method if the permissions on the current page don't work with what you want to do with your wiki. For instance, if you want everyone in the company to contribute, you may not want to put the wiki in your department's site because members of other departments won't have contributor rights. Instead, you may want to create a subsite with unique permissions and grant everyone, or specific groups contributor rights. In both cases, a Home page and a How To Use This Wiki Site page are created.
The How To page will explain how to use a wiki so I'm going to take this time to highlight some of the things mentioned in the file and show you how the process of editing a page looks. I'm going to edit the default home page created. Below is an image of the page before any changes.
As you can see in the image, the quick launch bar contains a link to the Wiki Pages library and shows each page in the library below it. You'll also notice 3 buttons above the top-right corner of the content area (Edit, History, Incoming Links).
When you click on the Edit button in the top-right corner, an edit page containing a text editor will load. As you can see below, editing a page can be very simple and will take very little time showing employees how to contribute to the wiki. As you can see, I'm going to change the "Your" in the title with a red "MY".
Making this change and clicking the OK button will take you back to the page with my text changes. If we click on the History button, we will be able to see our changes highlighted and references to several versions of the page on the left. You'll see a legend just below the toolbar showing that deleted text will be highlighted in gray while new text will be indicated by a yellow highlight. The left column, as I mentioned earlier, shows the different versions of this page. The current version is at the top of the list. If I were to click on version 1.0, I will see an unedited version of my document. If you have more versions, you will see any changes made to the document up until that version and who made the change that resulted in that version. You'll also see an option to restore that version in the toolbar.
Now, what if you to add a link to another wiki page. Easy. Just write the name of the page that you're going to create enclosed with 2 square brackets on each side. The next image has an example highlighted. [[More Information]] will create a link to a page but I haven't created the page yet.
When you click the ok button, you'll see a link with a dotted underline beneath the text. This dotted line indicates that a page doesn't exist yet. When you click on the link, a new page edit form loads and you can begin creating your content. When you click OK, the page is created. Go back to your original page and the line becomes solid underneath the link.
Well, that was my brief look at wikis. Very simple isn't it. Again, wikis are good for getting employees to contribute content to a topic on the fly. As you saw, its very easy to create pages and links. The editor is a typical editor control that requires very little time to get used to and restoring previous versions of a page is very simple.
If you are having trouble deciding when to use a wiki, here are a few ideas:
- Information on a product that you provide.
- Ideas/changes/features for that product.
- A SharePoint wiki??? A quick source on how to use SharePoint maybe.
Labels: End-User
