How To Build A Scalable, Time-Saving Wiki In Notion

Notion’s new wiki feature stands out as a powerful tool for creating a system that meets the unique demands of your ever-growing organization or community. If your goal is to establish a robust, user-friendly, and easily navigable knowledge repository, Notion is the solution. But wait, there’s more to it! We're here to support you and guide you trough the process of creating a scalable, time-saving wiki for your organization, offering insights and practical steps. So, let's embark on this exciting journey together.

If you'd like a visual walkthrough of the steps we took to build our community's wiki, feel free to watch our YouTube tutorial for a more detailed demonstration.

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Why Build a Notion Wiki?

Traditional wikis can often resemble a maze, making it challenging to find the right information or determine who's responsible for what. Notion introduces a game-changing wiki feature that transforms any page into a database of its pages. This enables the use of database functionalities, such as adding properties to each page or creating custom views to segment information for specific individuals. And also, the fact that each subpage becomes a database entry brings several advantages, especially when you need specific team members to access only particular subpages.

Consider a project with multiple contributors, assigned unique roles. By adding properties to the system's pages, you ensure that each team member sees only the content relevant to their role. This not only customizes their experience but also saves time. Whenever a new team member joins your organization, you don't need to create a new wiki or a new database. Instead, you can adjust the properties of the existing one, making the process incredibly simple.

To sum it up, here are the primary objectives we aim to achieve on this journey:

1. Clear Ownership: we aim to ensure that the owners of each wiki page are clearly indicated.
2. User-Friendly Navigation: we want to simplify the process of users finding the information they need without embarking on a treasure hunt.
3. Structured Simplicity: we want to maintain a clean system and ensure that pages don’t go too deep when I click on them.

Now, let's dive into the practical steps for building your Notion wiki.

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Creating your Notion Wiki

In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of setting up the wiki system for our organization. end-to-end and what we were able to accomplish. While our setup aligns with our organization's specific needs, feel free to adapt and customize it to suit your requirements. Understanding the fundamental principles is key to creating a wiki that genuinely meets your unique needs, without falling into the trap of blindly copying or dismissing a pre-made setup. The result will be a wiki with the following features:

1. Clear categorization of wiki pages: organize your pages into relevant categories.
2. Properties: customize properties to add useful information.
3. Utility of database views: utilize views to segment information.

Typically, organizations may require two types of wikis: one for internal team members and another for prospective team members or external audiences.

Internal Wiki

On the left side, you'll find a collection of different pages representing various resources. Resources encompass anything that team members need to read, understand, and manage to accomplish specific tasks or roles.

General Resources

We categorize resources into "general resources" and “team resources”. General resources cover essential topics like onboarding, task management, work scheduling, and resource management. Each page features a clear description that explains the resource’s purpose and provides step-by-step processes for different sections, so that’s easy for people to navigate. To maintain accessibility, these general resources are available to everyone in your organization.

Team Resources

Beyond general resources, we create specific team resources. To ensure that individuals within the organization can access only the resources relevant to their tasks, we establish a new group for each team. Creating a new group is a straightforward process: navigate to Settings → Members → Groups → Create a group, assign a name and add the relevant people to it. This way, when you open specific resources, you can click "Share" and guarantee that the corresponding group has "Can edit" access to the page. This allows you to control what others see and simplifies the management of permissions without having to create new dashboards each time you onboard someone new.

My Resources

Then we have “My Resources”, which is how we make sure that people in each group only have access to the specific subpages they need. When you open a resource page, you'll find various properties:

• Co-Creators: managers responsible for leading the resource.
• Collaborators: a members actively working on the resource.
• Verification: function to communicate that a page is accurante, relevant and up-to-date.
• Last edited: displays the last modification made to the page.
• Focus checkbox: Allows you to concentrate on specific resources, making it easier to manage your goals and tasks.

Templates

One of the advantages of turning this into a database is that each page can access database templates. Database templates provide an opportunity to replicate page structures that work for you.

When creating a new resource folder, we employ a helpful template that ensures we include:

• One sentence to describe the intention behind the resource folder.
• The reason for creating the resource folder.
• An explanation of what it does.
• Instructions on how to get started.

This approach makes it simple for all members to navigate the wiki and comprehend the purpose of each page and how to access the information they need.

The resource template extends to resources within the folders. The template is designed to explain everything in terms of three primary use cases. Handling more than three use cases can become overwhelming, so creating a new resource for additional cases is recommended.

Our "Success Plan" encompasses intentional goal setting, objective management, project tracking, and task management. For an in-depth understanding of this, you can watch our dedicated video. In this section, everything is filtered based on the individual so that each person only sees the tasks they are responsible for.

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Public Wiki

The public wiki is tailored to display specific information to external audiences or those interested in your organization. On the left side, you'll find various programs offered by our organization. Each program is categorized into one of three different transformations:

1. Unlocking Potential: Programs designed to empower students or creatives with knowledge, practical tools, and a supportive community to help them grow.
2. Make a Positive Impact: Programs designed to allow external audiences to collaborate with us and become part of our community.
3. Living Your Best Life: Programs designed for people seeking to take the next step and co-create with us.

Each program page includes a descriptor that explains its utility, the purpose of the page, an explanation of what it does and instructions on how to get involved, so that’s it’s easy for people to embark on this journey and collaborate.

We outline a distinct funnel for each program, guiding members from initial awareness to retention.

This involves delineating four stages:

1. Awareness: The phase where users first get to know about the program.
2. Interest: Where users delve deeper into learning about our program.
3. Desire: The initial interaction users experience with our program.
4. Action: Deeper involvement and interaction with our program.
5. Retention: Strategies for maintaining user engagement with our program.

To visualize this process within the context of our AI-Assistant:

• Potential participants may discover us through backlink sites, social media, or YouTube.
• From there, they land on our website, entering the "interest funnel."
• Inside the funnel, they learn about the AI assistant and receive free AI credits to explore its capabilities.
• As users become more engaged, they may choose to pay for premium features.
• Eventually, they may choose to subscribe, leading to customer retention.

This structured funnel framework ensures that every user comprehends the pathway and can seamlessly interact with our programs.

In essence, it's really important to make things clear, simple, and easy for you to use. We hope this article has given you helpful ideas and made it easier for you to understand the best ways to do things. As you explore the endless possibilities Notion's new wiki feature offers, we trust you'll uncover innovative ways to adapt and enhance your organization's workflows. Understanding the "why," "what," and "how" behind our choices will empower you to succeed in building the solutions that meet your specific needs. This will set you up for success.