Why use a wiki for your project?
<Customize this page to match your organization, some points may not apply to your wiki>
A wiki offers a free-form way to capture important information for your project. The wiki is accessible anywhere, anytime. You can access it from home, the hotel room, or the office. It can seamlessly grow as your project grows. It is secure, yet easy to log into. <this last statement assumes you set up domain authentication or similar in your wiki.>
The more you use the wiki and the more content you add to it, the more useful it becomes!
Discussion Pages - We're all used to email, it's easy and it comes right to our inbox. However, using discussion pages has a number of advantages:
Onboarding - often times, someone might be assigned mid-way thru the project. Rather than trying to find relevant emails to forward, point them to the discussion pages. They serve as a permanent record of design decisions and discussions.
Central reference - anyone on the project can view/comment on discussions. No one is excluded, no one is accidentally left off a crucial mailing.
Subscribe to discussions - if you miss receiving that email, you can 'subscribe' to that page and get notified via email anytime someone makes a post (in fact, team members are encouraged to subscribe).
An example discussion page <link to example> from a live project.
<Discussion Pages requires the excellent PageComment2 macro, which allows for easy and rapid posting of comments, almost like a forum>
Searching - Can't remember which meeting notes referred to milestones? Lost that task list? If they're in the wiki, you're only a search away!
Break the "download-edit-upload" cycle - The problem with 'posting' documents to a File Server <in our case, we have multiple offices> or a FTP site is that you inevitably face revision issues. And, you tediously have to download the document, open it to edit, and re-upload the file back. It's all very time-consuming, but we've become so accustomed to it we don't even realize it. Switching to wiki makes document-pages instantly available, and searchable!
One central version - Important documents tend to get circulated via email. This leads to several different versions floating around, which eventually leads to version control issues (who has the most current version?). With wiki, the document maintained as a web page, and it's always up to date because changes are made directly to the page itself. It's instantly available, and just a click away!
Revision control - What happens if someone trashes your page? Never a problem-- every single change is revisioned! Anyone can revert to a previous version, you can compare changes, see who made the change and when they made it. Try it now, click the "Info" button on the toolbar above, you get to see the evolution of this page with every save I've made!
Include images and flash animation - Just like regular web pages, images can be included with a few simple steps. Here's an example <link to example> of a wiki page with images. Instructions for including images is in the EditingFAQ tab.
Post documents - Documents can be easily be linked for one-click downloading. This is especially convenient for posting forms or other (relatively) static documents. And, because the wiki is free-form, you can describe or include instructions with the link. A good live example is the <link to example>. Also, remember that wiki is a web page, so you can just as easily link to documents on FTP sites, client sites, or Subversion.
Post documents sparingly - Ideally, you want the content incorporated into the wiki itself so that it's searchable, navigable, and usable. In other words, create a new wiki page for the relevent content. Remember, we want to try and break the "download-edit-upload" cycle.
Calendars - This wiki includes support for simple calendars. Use it to chart milestones, project meetings, and deadlines. A sample calendar <link to example>. <I suggest installing the excellent Event Calendar macro, which lets you view your events at a glance!>