“Spend another month just adding content from emails (now that you are familiar with the wiki it will be much easier) and when you get an email asking a question, make a wiki page, and reply back with a link to the wiki page that answers their question. Next email you get with the same question, give them the same link.”

That is just so efficient. Nice work and remember your comment on this blog will result in Provident Partners donating a food item to a St. Paul food shelter.

All the best,

Go to the wiki, and make one page, announcing it is for your department, with child pages to appear beneath. Then make a second page describing how to edit the wiki.
If you are like me, you already have a stack of notes, bookmarks of websites, a collection of text files, word documents, excel spread sheets, address books, and saved emails you go to every day to reference things like “What is the code for stores in the West?” “Who is the contact in sales that knows about blackberries?” “What is the phone number of the fax machine for the biggest store?” “What is the team that handles issues with email?” and even the simple “What is the website where we time punch?”

You might be thinking “I should just convert all of this”. But you are looking at a monumental task if you were to try and do it all at once. Instead, keep the wiki webpage open. And when you have to reach into your notes to check something (and someone isn’t tapping their foot needing it yesterday), add a child page to the wiki and put in nothing more than the info.

Anytime you receive an email and think “Oh I should bookmark the site they link to” or “I should add this to my notes”, add it to the wiki instead. If you archive all your old email anyway, you can still search it in case the wiki ever goes down.

Keep this up for about a month, adding a page with about a paragraph of text every day or every other day, and within a month, you’ll have 15+ pages of relevant information on things you have been concerned with in the past 30 days. Go ahead and take an afternoon to observe what’s there, do a little editing, link some things, consolidate some pages, realize that some new pages should really be added, and add them.

Spend another month just adding content from emails (now that you are familiar with the wiki it will be much easier) and when you get an email asking a question, make a wiki page, and reply back with a link to the wiki page that answers their question. Next email you get with the same question, give them the same link.
Finally your next project that requires collaboration with another employee, make a new page, and keep track of notes with the wiki, and at the bottom of the page, put in a link to the “How to edit the wiki” page, send the link to the new page you made to your coworkers.

And when they ask, try not to evangelize to much. Focus on how easy it is to add new content and how nothing gets deleted. And how anyone in the company is able to access the information, and how if all departments had a presence, we could share information so much easier.