Guide on organizing and upkeeping wiki pages

A wiki platform allows for the creation, presentation, and organization of information. Wiki spaces are collections of pages organized around a common topic and pages can be any length, contain any kind of information, be edited or modified easily, and be structured and linked in a number of ways. This flexible nature makes wikis a great way to share information quickly and easily, but this flexibility can also make wiki spaces can confusing and disorganized. This guide contains some practices that can help you maintain and upkeep your wiki space so that its information is easily accessible and organized.

In this guide we will be referring to two different groups of people with roles:

• author(s) - people who are creating, editing, and maintaining wiki pages.
• reader(s) - people who are interested in reading, following, or consuming the information on the wiki pages.

Structure of Wiki Spaces and its Pages

A method of organizing wiki spaces that works well is the "Landing page to children" pattern.

What are Landing Pages?

A landing page serves to:

1. orient readers to the structure of the information
2. directs them to where to go next.

A landing page can contain:

• Critical / important information such as meeting times and upcoming events.
  
• General information like a section “About this initiative”
• Current activity like news or latest updates
• Links to child pages and / or provides child page navigation

Landing page example: the Right to Decide Learning Exchange landing page.

Landing pages are typically the page you want readers to visit first and regularly - therefore landing pages should be planned to be updated routinely as information changes.

What are Children Pages?

On a wiki, a page can be created as a direct descendant of another page therefore creating a parent-child page relationship. A parent page can have any number of children, and those children can have any number of children and so on. This flexibility is very powerful to create a hierarchy of related information but can also lead to confusing information structures. Using the "Landing page to children" pattern can help maintain logical order to wiki pages.

A child page to a landing page should focus on a single topic, and if a topic is very large, a child page can be another landing page (a sub-landing page) for that particular topic and have grandchildren pages.

To create a child page, the author starts at the landing (or parent) page, and then create a new page (for instructions, visit "Creating a new wiki page").

Example: This page, "The Guidelines", acts as a landing page. Its children "1 Healthcare Recipients", "2 Healthcare Providers", etc. each focus on a singular topic.