Corporate Wiki
A collaborative internal platform where employees create, edit, and maintain organizational knowledge, acting as a shared repository for company information.
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What is a Corporate Wiki?
A corporate wiki is an internal platform where people across your organization can create, edit, and maintain shared knowledge together. Picture your company's own private Wikipedia, a space where teams add information about processes, projects, policies, and lessons learned that anyone can access and improve over time.
What really sets a corporate wiki apart is its collaborative nature. Traditional documentation usually has a single author who controls everything. Wikis flip that model on its head. Any employee can add new pages, fix mistakes, update stale content, or flag something that needs attention. This distributed approach keeps knowledge fresh and takes pressure off any one person or team to document everything.
Corporate wikis act as a single source of truth for organizational knowledge. They help tear down information silos by making knowledge sharing visible across departments. And when someone leaves the company? Their knowledge stays behind in the wiki instead of walking out the door with them.
Key Characteristics of a Corporate Wiki
- Collaborative Editing: Multiple employees can create, modify, and update content. This crowdsourcing approach spreads documentation work around and keeps information current.
- Internal Access Only: Unlike public help centers, corporate wikis stay strictly for employees, contractors, and approved internal users. They contain proprietary and confidential information.
- Easy Navigation: Wikis rely on interlinked pages, categories, and search so users can find what they need quickly or stumble upon related information.
- Version History: Most wiki platforms track changes, showing who edited what and when. This creates an audit trail and lets you roll back to previous versions if something goes wrong.
- Low Barrier to Entry: Contributing should not require technical skills. Wikis usually have simple editors anyone can pick up without training, which helps foster a strong documentation culture.
Corporate Wiki Examples
Example 1: Tech Company Knowledge Sharing
A software company uses a corporate wiki to document engineering decisions, API specifications, deployment procedures, and project retrospectives. When a new engineer joins, they browse the wiki to understand why the team made certain architectural choices. Teams update pages as systems change, building a living record of technical knowledge.
Example 2: Manufacturing Operations
A manufacturing firm maintains a corporate wiki covering equipment maintenance schedules, safety protocols, supplier contacts, and quality standards. Floor supervisors add tips and lessons learned from experience. When problems come up, technicians check the wiki for troubleshooting guides written by colleagues who faced the same issues.
Corporate Wiki vs Knowledge Base
A corporate wiki and a knowledge base get tossed around interchangeably sometimes, but they work differently in practice.
| Aspect | Corporate Wiki | Knowledge Base |
|---|---|---|
| Authorship | Crowdsourced, anyone can contribute and edit | Typically managed by designated authors or teams |
| Structure | More freeform and organic, evolving over time | Usually more structured with defined categories |
| Content style | Collaborative, may include informal notes and drafts | Polished, verified, and maintained content |
| Best for | Capturing diverse perspectives and rapid iteration | Authoritative reference material and official procedures |
How Glitter AI Helps with Corporate Wikis
Building and maintaining a corporate wiki takes real effort. Glitter AI cuts this burden by letting employees record their screen while performing tasks, then automatically generating wiki-ready documentation with screenshots and step-by-step instructions.
This approach works particularly well for wikis because it makes contributing much easier. Rather than spending time writing and formatting documentation, employees just do their work while recording. Glitter handles the heavy lifting, turning that recording into clear, organized content ready to publish to the wiki.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a corporate wiki?
A corporate wiki is an internal collaborative platform where employees create, edit, and share organizational knowledge. It works like a private Wikipedia for your company.
What is the difference between a corporate wiki and a knowledge base?
A corporate wiki emphasizes collaborative editing where anyone can contribute, while a knowledge base typically has designated authors and more structured, verified content. Wikis tend to be more freeform, knowledge bases more curated.
Why do companies use corporate wikis?
Companies use corporate wikis to preserve institutional knowledge, break down information silos, reduce knowledge loss when employees leave, and give everyone access to the information they need to do their jobs.
What should be included in a company wiki?
Common wiki content includes company policies, process documentation, project information, meeting notes, onboarding materials, technical documentation, and any knowledge that multiple people need to access or reference.
What is an enterprise wiki?
An enterprise wiki is another term for a corporate wiki, typically used when referring to larger organizations. It is a company-wide knowledge sharing platform for internal collaboration.
How do you build an effective corporate wiki?
Start with clear organization and categories, make contributing easy for anyone, establish guidelines for content quality, assign owners to review key sections, and regularly archive or update outdated content.
What are popular corporate wiki tools?
Common corporate wiki platforms include Confluence, Notion, SharePoint, Nuclino, Slite, and Guru. Many companies also use general documentation tools that support wiki-style collaboration.
How do corporate wikis prevent knowledge loss?
By encouraging employees to document their knowledge in a central, accessible location, corporate wikis capture institutional knowledge before people leave. This information stays with the company even when staff turnover happens.
Who should contribute to a corporate wiki?
Everyone in the organization should be encouraged to contribute. Subject matter experts add specialized knowledge, while all employees can document processes they know well, update outdated information, and share lessons learned.
What is an internal wiki used for?
An internal wiki is used for documenting company processes, storing project information, sharing best practices, onboarding new employees, and creating a searchable repository of organizational knowledge accessible only to staff.
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