What is WikiGardening?

A wiki is a place where people gather to collaborate. Like a meeting room or a living room, it gets cluttered after a little while. Another common metaphor is a garden, which gets overgrown without regular tending.

Spending small amounts of time gardening on a regular basis helps to make your wiki easy to navigate and a pleasant place to work.

Here are some techniques to use when you have some spare quality time to spend with the wiki. Add yours!

• Pick some pages and clean them up -- correct misspellings, collect and condense comments, regularize the way lists or comments are formatted.
• When you are working on a topic, find the relevant pages and make an index of those pages. These finder's aids are a long tradition in archives management where you need to quickly get to a few relevant documents mixed in with a large quantity of routine correspondence.
• Add links from the home page to often-used index pages
• Condense discussion into a statement of the end result, and add a link to the original discussion. See gardening, which was merged into this page.
• Break long pages into meaningful sub-pages. Add links to the sub-pages from a main page.
• Add existing pages to appropriate categories.
• If you have old pages that you are no longer finding useful, make a link near the top of them to new pages that have more relevant information on the subject.
• Remove obsolete material. Create linked archive pages if the material is useful
• Everyone on the team can participate in continuous improvement. Depending on the structure of your team, it may make sense for one person to have special responsibility for maintaining a set of pages. Or it may make sense to have a designated gardener.
• Gardening is most effective when it's done a bit at a time. Team members can take responsibility for making something they are working on more useful for everyone.

What to do about this wiki?

1. It's full of sandbox and testpages
1. It's especially bad, if normal words are also associated with garbage
2. Spend a few minutes with the CrapCollectorScript, and the site will become cleaner!
3. On long term, running an isolated playground.flexwiki.com would be good
2. It's full of senseless rename redirects
1. Delete all useless redirect pages, and leave only one, with the good name and good content!
3. Usefull pages with garbage injected
1. Inexperienced users accidentally edited the page, inserted text/templates and saved.
2. Misleading Title: and Summary: properties
3. Clear these!
4. Outdated or divergent "discussion" topics
1. Tough question what to do with them. Simply delete?
5. Very similar topics running on different pages
1. Hard to identify...
2. One group, for example: QuickSetup, ConfiguringFlexWiki, InstallingFlexWiki, SettingUpFlexWikiInAnExistingVirtualServer, Installation, Guide, etc.
3. Best solution: merge, restucture the topics
4. Easiest solution: See_also: properties

Related problem: the site is hard to navigate. There is no structure, "sitemap". This is the origin of 5)

Creating a categorized index could be good. Needs good AI, or lots of manpower continuously...

-- SzaMa - 2006.10.23.