For the last couple of months I’ve been trying to reorganize the wiki my software company uses for internal communication. It’s been a rather daunting task, because we haven’t really had any posting rules, so in the truest sense of the word “wiki”, my colleagues & I have just been posting things as we like. So we’ve now got this ginormous (yes, that’s a real word, haha) mess of a wiki that you can’t really find anything on. In October my boss had asked us to take on a “leadership task” that was related to our jobs, but that we weren’t directly responsible for. I opened my big mouth and said that I’d like to reorganize the wiki.
Big mistake.
I kept getting side-tracked by “real” work, and so could never get much done on this project. Add to this the fact that to get any back-end configuration done, I had to put in a ticket with our Systems Administrators, who, being seriously understaffed, never managed to get to my tickets. Since I was usually side-tracked, it wasn’t a huge problem.
Then a few months ago I started seeing articles on Sarah Maddox’s TW blog about using wikis for online help. And so I would always think that I should get back to my wiki reorg project. But then something else would come up, and nothing would happen.
Last week I had a “year end” chat with my boss, and being that this job is still relatively new to me (I only started there in August) as well as the company (they’d never had a TW before I started, now there are two of us!) I was a little nervous. I don’t know about you, but I typically get nervous about these types of meetings with my boss, even though I know nothing bad will happen, it’s just my nature to worry. My boss tells me that he’s “results driven”, and would like to see me finish off more tasks.
Interesting, since most of my work isn’t tied to any software releases like at previous companies, so it’s a tad difficult to sort this out. At any rate, I figured that this was the exact impetus I needed to get my wiki reorg moving. So I attacked it with vigour.
And have made progress! Very exciting.
I’ve completed two out of the five wikis I’ve got to work on, but don’t cheer for me too much just yet, because those are the “small” ones. I still have to attack the ginormous one, but I’m looking forward to it. I took advantage of a new Systems Administrator who hadn’t really been assigned any work yet, and got him to make a bunch of configuration changes that were blocking me. So now it’s up to me to do all the heavy lifting.
But it feels satisfying to have made some progress, and I’ve given myself a target of Feb. 29th to have it all done. Let’s see if that happens.
4 responses so far ↓
annegentle // January 9, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Say, that’s an excellent task to take on. Could you write another post about how you went about it? It’s such a daunting task.
It’s interesting, I’ve been helping out with the wiki.laptop.org site, and there are complaints occasionally about its organization. Someone recently posted to the OLPC Library list about the wiki’s structure (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/2008-January/000193.html) and offered categories for the content. Did you employ a similar approach? How did you prioritize the “flat vs. hierarchical” approach that the poster questioned?
I’d be curious to learn about your methods and priorities while doing your wiki reorg.
annegentle // January 9, 2008 at 4:59 pm
And how does your spacebar get you into trouble?
ffeathers // January 12, 2008 at 3:33 am
Great post! It sounds like you have your work cut out for you, with the ‘ginormous’ wiki. I’d be really interested to hear more about what the structural issues are, and how you go about solving them. Great timing with your tame/uninitiated sys admin. You have to catch them before they become jaded
I’m facing a similar restructuring task with one of our wiki spaces. It contains the technical documentation for a software product. Funnily enough, that product itself is the wiki which the documents are describing. We have the users’ guide, the admin guide, installation and setup guides, FAQs, developer guides etc — all in one space. It has kind of grown organically. And now it needs a bit of tlc.
Like you, I’ve been at my job for 8 months now. It’s difficult to find the time for such large ‘maintenance’ tasks. We’ve started here and there, but I’m really keen to get stuck into the major tasks. Care to bet which one of us will get there first? Just kidding!
Wiki makeover « ffeathers — a technical writer’s blog // January 12, 2008 at 5:00 am
[...] in Confluence, technical writing, wiki by ffeathers on January 12th, 2008 J the TW writes on Spacebar about some wiki restructuring that she is about to undertake. Her blog post struck a strong chord [...]