Top 3 Reasons You Should Upgrade Your Company Wiki

A recent study showed that 57% of companies still use wiki software to manage their content and knowledge. 10 years ago, wikis might be considered the best technology in town as it provides a way for employees to collaborate on documentation. But in today's fast-changing economy, wiki alone simply cannot keep up with the needs for managing your team knowledge and a more advanced solution is required.

Must-haves for a good knowledge management system

1. Easily capture knowledge and keep it up-to-date
2. Easily share knowledge and collaborate with colleagues
3. Easily discover knowledge without browsing through tons of documents

With the right tool in place, you will be able to foster a knowledge-sharing culture, maintain an up-to-date knowledge base, and streamline knowledge transfer between groups such as sales, marketing, product and customer support.

Learn more about how to build a successful knowledge management system.

Top 3 reasons why wikis fail

1. No validation mechanism

Wiki is simply a collaborative way to do documentation. At the end of the day, it is still a flat document. Each employee can create a wiki doc on a specific topic, but there is no built-in mechanism to validate if the information is accurate. Most people will not have the time to review others' write-ups, particularly when the content is long. Sometimes, correct information gets mistakenly changed and it is virtually impossible to find it out without digging through all the edit histories.

New knowledge management solutions support multiple means for content validation. AllAnswered, for example, allows three types of validation for different types of content by leveraging the power of communities -

1. Pages, designed to capture dynamic knowledge that is constantly changing, has a predefined verification schedule.
2. Users can also request ad-hoc verification for all content when they think the content might be outdated.
3. Users can vote up or down content and accept answers to a question. Posts with high vote counts indicate high quality and value.

2. Cluttered with outdated and inaccurate information

Company wiki is like your closet. It is nice and clean at the beginning but over time, it accumulates tons of documents that contain information that is no longer relevant or correct. But because wiki docs are flat, it is virtually impossible to find the erroneous content and correct them.

AllAnswered, on the other hand, utilizes different content types for different types of knowledge. Pages and Records are enhanced Wiki with built-in workflow to capture explicit knowledge and keep it updated. Tacit knowledge is captured and shared with posts which include Q&As, ideas, polls and announcements. Each post captures a single piece of knowledge that evolves over time. Users can add new answers or comments if things changed and upvote the best content. Community moderators can also update content or remove them completely if they are no longer needed.

If your organization has used wiki for some time, you know how difficult it is to find the information you are looking for through a global search. On the other hand, if you use AllAnswered, because each content is so targeted and updated, it is much easier to find what you need. And you can also search for information within a specific community so it is a much smaller list that you have to go through.

3. Not designed for sharing

The best you can do with a wiki when it comes to sharing is post a piece of content and email a link to others. Some wiki tools allow adding @user to trigger email notifications to the people you mentioned. But it is still a very manual process.

AllAnswered, on the other hand, puts sharing as the No. 1 priority. It utilizes communities to get people together who share a common mission or interest. You can create communities for projects, groups or any topics. Smart Notification with Artificial Intelligence will determine who should be notified when someone creates or updates a piece of content. At the same time, it also offers users the flexibility to subscribe to a community, a tag or a specific content. This way, everyone in the community is highly engaged and informed without inundated by too many emails.

If your team is using Slack, a community in your team can also be mapped to a specific Slack channel by community moderators. Once it is set up, you can configure what content you want to cross post to the Slack channel using our Slack integration.

Want more information? Check out our in-depth analysis on Corporate Wiki vs. Knowledge Base.

Company wiki software may still work if you are in a mature and stable industry where changes are slow and rare. But if you are not as fortunate, you will find your company wiki simply cannot keep up the pace with your team. It is time to stay competitive by investing in a modern knowledge management solution that allows your employees to easily capture and share valuable company knowledge. You will see a big jump in productivity as the result.