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First I distinguish between two kinds of knowledge: one is like encyclopedic knowledge, just with private topics (what is X, why did Y come into existence, things you must know when Z), the other overlaps a lot with opinion, "best practice" and "style guide" would be examples.

Both may end up in the internal wiki, but that's a write-only operation unless you get people to read. And a wiki is nothing anyone reads front to back, wikis are entirely pull.

For the encyclopedic kind, I try to sprinkle some links where there is a chance that people (e.g. me, two months later) actually do an index search. This is not the wiki, this is email (or some successor thereof).

The opinion type knowledge will be even more lost in the wiki. Outside of extremely chain-of-command oriented organizations, the only way to spread that kind of knowledge is by actually convincing others. And a wall of text in an internal wiki will never do that. But the wiki page can be very useful as a collection of convincing examples etc to reference in a discussion that happens elsewhere.




The tragically correct answer. As I ready this I was hoping you were going to come up with a magic bullet at the end.




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