Wikis¶

A wiki is the stuff your group knows, written down somewhere it can be found again. How the bar float works. What the committee decided about dogs. Which of the three spreadsheets is the real one.

Every group has this knowledge and most groups keep it in a person. That works beautifully until the person is on holiday, and then it turns out nobody else knows the code for the cupboard.

Making one¶

New Wiki on the initiative's Wikis tab. Name it, say what it covers, done. One wiki per body of knowledge — "Club handbook", "World bible", "How we run the fete" — not one per topic. The topics are the pages.

Pages, and the shape they make¶

Open a wiki and it takes the screen. The navigation you were using slides away and the wiki's pages take its place, with an arrow at the top to climb back out — the same thing My Messages does with conversations. The page you are reading lists its own headings underneath itself in that column, so a long page is one click away from any part of it.

That is deliberate. A wiki is read by moving around it, so the shape of it stays in front of you the whole time.

Pages nest. Hover any page in the tree and a + appears to start one underneath it, open and ready to type in — so "Bar" can have "Float", "Stock" and "The till that hates everyone" filed under it. Nest as deep as makes sense, which is usually two levels and occasionally three.

Duplicate, in a page's menu, puts a copy beside it called "(Copy)". The pages filed under it stay where they are, so copying "Bar" gives you one page to rewrite rather than a second bar.

Drag a page onto another to file it underneath. Drag it to a row's top or bottom edge to put it beside instead. A page cannot be dropped inside itself, which is the one move the tree will not let you make.

Files you already have can sit in a wiki too: Add a file at the bottom of the tree offers every file in the initiative — a PDF, a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, a link. Each opens in the wiki the way it opens anywhere, and drags like a page, so the fire risk assessment can live under "Health and safety" where people will actually look for it. Nothing is copied. The file keeps its own address and its own sharing, and can sit somewhere else entirely in another wiki.

A page is written in the same editor as a text document, with the same toolbar and the same shortcuts. If you've written a text document here, you already know how — and like one, several people can write on the same page at once, each with their own cursor.

Linking, which is the actual point¶

Type [[ in a page and pick another page. That's a link.

Then look at the page you linked to. It knows. Its Connections list has your page under Mentioned in, and there you are.

This is the bit that makes a wiki more than a folder of pages, and it's worth stopping on for a second. You never maintain a list of what points where. You write a link because it made sense in that sentence, and the map builds itself out of the links everybody happened to write.

It isn't only pages, either. # picks anything — a task, a file, an event, a counter — and the same thing happens: link the bar float page from a task about counting the bar float, and the page tells you the task exists.

Connections sits beside the page on a wide screen, and opens from the bottom of the screen on a phone. It starts as a plain list of links; it can be tiles, a carousel or a graph instead, and each page remembers which. See Mentions & links.

What goes in one¶

The test is roughly: would somebody ask this in the group chat, and would somebody else have to remember the answer?

• How something works. The float, the rota, the thing with the printer.
• What was decided, and why. Especially the why. The decision gets remembered; the reason evaporates by March.
• The list somebody keeps in their head. Suppliers. Passwords for things that aren't secret. Which door sticks.
• The onboarding you currently do out loud, in full, every time, to each new person.

What doesn't go in one: anything with a date and a person attached. That's a task. Anything that's a conversation — comment on the thing you're discussing, and the conversation stays on it.

Making it yours¶

The gear in a wiki's header opens what that wiki is for. None of it is required, and all of it is one switch:

Sharing¶

A wiki is shared like every other tool, from Settings → Access on the wiki. Read access lets people read the whole thing; write access lets them add and edit pages.

Pages aren't shared separately. A wiki is one thing to share, because the whole point is that it hangs together — a handbook with three pages missing isn't a handbook.

The home page¶

A wiki opens on whichever page you nominate as its home — Set as home page from a page's own menu. Nominate nothing and it opens on the first page in the tree, which is fine for a while and gets less fine as it grows.

Make the home page a contents page. A short one. Three sentences saying what this wiki is, and links to the four places most people are actually going.

Taking a copy¶

Settings → Advanced on the wiki exports it, for whoever could also delete it. As a PDF, Markdown or Word file it's the whole wiki as one document: every page under a heading with its title, nested as deep as the page sits, each starting a new page in PDF and Word, drafts left out. As an importable file it keeps every page, the tree, the home page and the files kept in it — import it from another wiki page and the files go back under the same pages.

Whichever you pick, the download is a zip: the wiki, and the files kept in it, each in the format that suits it — text in the format you picked, spreadsheets as Excel, uploads as themselves. A file you couldn't export on its own stays behind.

Deleting a page¶

A page goes to the trash and takes its sub-pages with it, because putting away a section means putting away the section. It's all restorable from Trash for as long as your community keeps deleted things.