Having introduced an internal wiki to a company and it instantly being a hit, the role of application support has come on leaps and bounds. However some people are yet to embrace the creation of such pages, or are going about it in a sub optimal manner.
These are some common misconceptions about the wiki that I'm sure will come up again in the future, (cementing my views about point 1).
1) Why do I need to write that down, I know how to do it now?
Yes you do, but will you remember in 3 months time? especially if it's a less common occurance. Also the wiki is not just for you, it's for everyone.
2) I don't want anyone to change my posts, what if they fill it with false information?
Perhaps you should work on your control issues? Also there is a history you can revert the pages to, so if a page does become "corrupted" you can restore it to a known good page. Remember, things change all the time and this includes instructions that you've written on wiki pages.
3) I got this error message, I'll just take a screen shot and post it on the wiki, job done.
That's great, but when someone sees an error the message they are likely going to want to search for that error message on the wiki. In a perfect world it would be able to search the image for text, but until that point comes, it might be a good idea to write out the error message in plain text to accompany the screen shot.
4) I can't show the text as I intended because it has special characters in it.
With any markup language there are escape characters to be used, or escape tags. Nearly all wiki's will have a page dedicated to the usage/formatting of the wiki. It should simply be a case of surrounding your text with the escape characters so your post can be shown as intended.
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