Maintaining a Programmer Wiki [closed]

Question

I was recently put in charge of the wiki for the development team. The wiki is still in its infancy, so I have a lot of room to work with. It goal is to house internal to the development team. Currently, the main piece of information that the wiki holds is Coding Standards.

• What are some best practices your dev team uses for its internal wiki?
• What information is important to have on a dev wiki?
• If you were to go to the wiki for your dev team what information would you expect to see?
• Is there some information that shouldn't go on the wiki even though it seems like a good idea?

-- edit --

• Also, is there a good way to organize the information? ( such as by layer ( data, ui), by porject, or other)

Answer 1

• Introduction to the source base for new programmers
• General documentation (not the API documentation per-se, but more tutorial like things)
• Lists of staff / who's doing what and how to reach them
• Notes / resources / articles that explain concepts used in the software
• Documentation of the build process and the filesystem layout of the codebase

Other things I usually put up there are

• Planning / todo lists
• Information that is interesting for others to read
• Everything else that I feel should be shared

Answer 2

We had a development wiki and it was a great tool. We used it for everything!

• When brainstorming new ideas, we'd capture them on the wiki. The low friction nature of the wiki made it easy for anyone in the organization (we were a small startup) to add ideas as they thought of them. We had a high level "brainstorming" page which linked to detailed pages containing a thorough description of each idea.
• For each iteration, we'd "move" feature idea items from the "brainstorming" list to the feature list for that iteration. The details of the feature were flushed out to include design and implementation details.
• As features were completed, the iteration page became our release notes page - which also included the release tag from our version control system.
• We had a bug page that worked very similar to the feature pages. Bug fixes were added to the iteration/release pages as they were worked on/complete.
• We also created our user documentation on the wiki and exported those pages it with the release.

As time went on. This tool was viewed more and more valuable. We wound up creating new wikis for different the products the company was working on.

I hope you find your development wiki as useful as we did!

Answer 3

Wikipatterns is a website dedicated to documenting best wiki practices. They also describe anti-patterns and talk about ways to deal with them. I read their book and it was a great asset for me to get a wiki off the ground in a 150+ person organization.

Answer 4

One thing that we stress on our dev wiki is that it is updated when things change. We don't want our wiki that is intended to provide information and be a central source of collected knowledge to become so out of date that it is useless. As the code is updated, developers are requested to update any related information on the wiki.

Other than Coding Standards, we keep tips and tricks for working with our code base, setup information for new hires, and general environment information.