It’s no secret that around here we are big wiki fans. But the paradox of wikis is that it’s so easy to collect information that suddenly there is too much of it. And that makes it hard to navigate the information. So a wiki must constantly be refactored - especially the navigation structures.
But no matter how good your navigation structures are, how do you make it easy for newcomers to get into the wiki? Our main space at Nektoon contains 452 pages at the moment - that’s after only six months of existence. At local.ch, my former work, there is a lot more after several years of wiki usage with many more people involved.
Today I started an experiment in the Nektoon wiki. The wiki tour, heavily inspired by the InterWiki TourBus. I created a nice and friendly welcome page which new people will get as the one and only link to our wiki. Also that page is linked prominently on the home page of our wiki.
Each of the pages in the bus tour has a small box at the bottom of the page. It includes some additional explanation for the current page and a link to the next page.
I’ll update our tour over time. I’m hoping that it does help getting into the wiki and finding some important pages.