The act of keeping the wiki contents neat and tidy, so that as the wiki grows the content is accurate, uncluttered, useful and well organized.
Also see: Sam Aparicio; “Gardening”; www.Socialtext.net (Jan.28’05).
Activities
- Linkify: One great thing about a wiki is the ability to enable cross-linking of pages. Many contributors, however, don't recognize all the opportunities to create links from the words in their entries. Where you see a word that could be a link but isn't, "linkify it" by turning it into a live link. You may find yourself linking to a page that doesn't exist, and that's OK. Someone (maybe even you) can always create the new page, or find another page to redirect the link to. It can also be useful to create indexes of relevant pages to help others navigate.
- De-duplicate: Different contributors will create highly similar pages with slightly different titles. Merge those pages, and redirect all the links to the merged page.
- Atomize: Break long pages into meaningful sub-pages, then link to them from an opening page. Remember, it's easier to link to a page than a section. If there's a page having sub-sections that other pages will want to link to, those sub-sections should be their own pages.
- Tag: Add tags where others have not. It's that simple.
- Clear/Prune/Secure: Remove obsolete material. If the material is old but still useful, tag it as "Archived" or move it to a separate Archive workspace. Really remove confidential material that shouldn't be on the wiki in the first place; apply appropriate permissions.
(Addition from James)
- Clean up: Fix spelling errors. Clean up awkward sentences. Correct grammatical errors. If you don't have permissions on the page, then leave a comment.
- Organize: Move pages within or between spaces as appropriate. Try to create structure within the wiki.
Remarks
- Anyone can garden. Gardening is an activity, not a job description. Anyone in a wiki can garden. In fact, the best gardeners are those who are closest to the subject matter. So pick a corner of the wiki that you really care about and take care of it--even if "gardener" isn't in your job description.
- Do a little at a time. When you see an opportunity to prune, just take a minute and do it.
- Don't expect to finish. Healthy wikis grow to the sky.
Cr/Via:
- Adina Levin, Chris Killingworth; “Wiki gardening tips”; www.Socialtext.net (Dec.20’03-May.20’10).
- James Hines; SeaWiki (Dec.21’10).
