Six weeks into having a wiki in the office and it has grown rapidly: we have over 70 pages, and another 20 or so calendar pages. So I'm writing here about how to manage your wiki so it is easy to view and navigate around.

Basically, there are two useful wiki features that allow you to take a glance at what your wiki contains and to help finding the information you need: lists of pages, notably here All pages, and the ability to categorise your pages.

All pages

Looking at a list of all the pages in your wiki will help if you are not sure whether you already have a suitable page for the information you need to enter or whether you should create a new page.

Why not simply make a new page? Because a wiki is a collaborative writing tool and any logged in user can change, there have to be safeguards against bad changes. One of these is the inability to delete a page once it has been created. Thus, the decision to make a new page needs to be deliberate, and it is probably best to write what may be the start of a new page in an already existing page and split it later if needed rather than ending up with unused pages in your All pages list.

How to find All pages: The automatic installation of MediaWiki software provides special links in the left navigation menu. One of the links is to Special pages, a page which lists all the special pages for the wiki's management tools.

On Special pages, you can follow the link for All pages to get a list of all the written pages on your wiki.

Categories

Using categories allows you to put related pages into a set for a shorter list than All pages.

Let's take procurement procedures as an example. You may have pages on suppliers, preferred and non-preferred, payment policies and procedures for invitations to tender, and lists of signatories to accounts.

Let's say you want to find out who are signatories to a particular account. You could use the wiki search facility to find the right page by searching for "bank account". But that would show all the pages with those words, most of which are irrelevant, and you would have to choose the one you want on the contextual presentation of the search results.

Using categories, you can view the Procurement category page, in which your target page, Signatories say, is listed.

How to find a page in a category: Special pages has a link to the page Categories, which lists all the categories in your wiki. Select the category you want and the category page shows all the pages within that category.

How to assign a page to a category: At the bottom of the page, by convention, write in the code for the category you want, for example:

[[Category:Procurement]]

Save the page and now you will see the link to the category page at the bottom of the page you have just written into.

More on categories

Categories are really worth persisting with as they really do help to navigate around your wiki and to see what sets of information you have. Here is my quick start guide to using them.

Creating a new category: Follow the instructions above for writing the category assignment into a page: just like putting the link to a page before writing it, (if you are not sure about this, I have written about it here), you put the code for a new category on a page as the first step to creating it. When you save the page, you will see the link to the category showing in red, because the category page hasn't been written yet.

Unlike creating a page, you don't have to write into the category page to create the category: your page is now categorised and you will see this category in the Categories page. But you may want to write a description of what the category is for. And you will have to do it if this new category is to be a subcategory of another.

Using subcategories: There will be a time when your wiki is so large that even dividing your pages into categories results in lists that are too long to find what you want easily.

For the above example of a Procurement category, you may want to divide it into subcategories for suppliers, purchasing procedures and payment procedure. To do this, say for a new Supplier category, change the category on all the supplier pages from Procurement to Supplier by writing in the code

[[category:Supplier]]

Then on the new Supplier category page, write the same code, at the bottom again by convention, under any description you may want to write, and the Supplier category is now a subcategory of Procurement.

Of course, Procurement may lie alongside other categories, say Invoicing and Payroll, as a subcategory itself of Accounts. Do this by writing in the code for the Accounts category in the category pages for Procurement, Invoicing and Payroll.

A final hint on categories

If you are a first time user, you may not find it easy to anticipate which categories you will need. But do start using them as soon as you can, bearing in mind that category pages, once written into, cannot be deleted.

I have found it handy to categorise a whole set of pages but leave alone ones that seem to stand on their own for now -- when the new category (and name) becomes obvious, Special pages has a list of uncategorised pages.