Build a docs-first culture with a beautiful team wiki, powered by a database

Stale documentation leads to unnecessary thrash at work. When you convert your team's knowledge to a wiki, you'll be able to verify pages, assign owners, and ensure that your team's knowledge is always fresh.

8 min read
wiki guide hero
Team wikis with verification, tags, owners, and more can help keep everyone on the same page, literally.
In this guide
  • Convert your team’s homepage into a wiki where you can organize, tag and verify pages in an easy-to-navigate layout.
  • Turn your company’s knowledge into a powerful wiki
  • Verify your documents so everyone will know they’re trustworthy
  • Filter and sort your wiki
  • Go beyond your team wiki

Clear, accurate documentation is the backbone of successful teams. When reliable information is readily available, team members can get on with their work instead of searching for information.

Convert your team’s homepage into a wiki where you can organize, tag and verify pages in an easy-to-navigate layout.

You need a documentation process where everyone can find the information they need, when they need it. And, when your teammates open a document they need to be sure of its accuracy.

But with hundreds of documents circling around, it can be difficult to keep everything current and trustworthy. Folks waste time asking whether this project scope includes everything discussed on the last client call, or if the brand guidelines and onboarding processes are still up to date.

To make matters worse, it’s not clear who they should ask. So, team members ping the wrong person or just drop their questions into a Slack group.

In this guide, we’ll show you why Notion is the perfect place to build a powerful team wiki which will be the single source of truth for relevant information.

Turn your company’s knowledge into a powerful wiki

A wiki is a great way to organize company or team information. With everything laid out in pages and columns, it’s simple to navigate and aesthetically pleasing.
You can quickly draw up a wiki using templates like the Product wiki, Engineering wiki and more from the Template gallery. Or create a team wiki from scratch by adding a top level page in your teamspace and then nestling relevant sub-pages inside.

Create your team wiki with templates

We’ve created wiki templates for your product team, engineering team, and more which you’ll find in the template gallery. You can duplicate these and customize them for your team.

A team wiki will include things like your standard operating procedures (onboarding, project planning, etc), guides and training materials, key information about benefits and vacation policy, brand guidelines and more, all on a self-serve basis.

Write team docs faster with Notion AI

If you need assistance when building your knowledge library, call up Notion AI to help you write, summarize, outline, improve your writing and more. Learn all about Notion AI here.

To level-up your wiki, click on the Options drop down on the top right of the page and choose Turn into Wiki.

When you do this, you’ll keep your beautiful wiki layout, and also unlock valuable features like the ability to categorize and organize pages, add properties, verify documents, create different views and layouts, and more.

Discover the possibilities of Notion databases

Databases let you organize, categorize, filter, search and view information in many different ways.Explore the database section of the Help Center and visit Notion Academy to learn how to use databases.

Verify your documents so everyone will know they’re trustworthy

The wiki comes with 4 default properties: Owner (person property), Last edited date, Tags (multi-select) and a Verification property which is unique to wikis. You can add any additional properties to your team wiki that your team will find useful, such as Created date or Status.

With the verification property, you can mark documents in the wiki with an expiration date. Once the verification expiry date arrives, you’ll receive a notification that it’s time to review the document. Then, you can make any changes or updates needed and renew the document’s verification. Alternatively, you can mark a document as infinitely verified so that it will never expire - you can always adjust this later if necessary.

When your team members view a document and see the “Verified” property filled out, this will inspire trust. Only the page owner of a specific page in the wiki can verify it. When team members see the verification stamp, they’ll know the content has been checked and won’t need to ask around to make sure.

Verification properties will be automatically added to your wiki. Team members can then choose the date that they want their document to be verified until, or select “infinite”.

Here are some different ways the verification property comes in handy:

  • Signal that documents are complete and up to date — When team members see the “Verified” property, they’ll be able to trust that the document they’re looking at has been checked and marked as true and complete until further notice.

  • Get reminded when it’s time to review or update wiki content — Often, you don’t realize a document is out of date until someone comes across it and questions it. The verification property helps you stay on top of information and you know you’ll be reminded when the time comes to update your information.

  • Track and renew your team goals periodically — You can create a page in your wiki for quarterly goals and verify that page until the end of the current quarter. When it’s time to review the document, you’ll analyze your progress and set new goals for the upcoming quarter.

  • Create evergreen documents which won’t change — Documents like your company values and mission statement are likely to stay the same for a significant amount of time. You can mark these as infinitely verified so you never get notified to change them, though you can always change this status if necessary.

The verification property is unique to wikis

A wiki has all the same properties as a regular database, plus an additional verification property.
Learn more about database properties here.

Filter and sort your wiki

When you’re reviewing wiki content, you might want to see a particular sub-set of information - for example, everything related to onboarding, or training materials.

You can filter the information based on certain properties, sort information in unique ways, and create multiple views using different layouts.

Here are some ways you might filter, sort and organize your wiki content:

  • Review verified docs that are soon to expire — Sort your wiki by verification expiry date so you can start going through docs that will soon be up for review.

  • Check all non-verified docs in a simple list view — Create a filtered view of all docs where the verification property is either expired, or left blank. You can then go through these docs and start filling up necessary information.

  • Update everything related to a particular topic — If your company has just announced a change to the brand guidelines, for example, you can filter your wiki for everything tagged as related to branding. Then, go through and update all those docs with the changes.

  • Check the relevancy of your oldest wiki content for updates — You can sort your database by Created date (ascending) or Last edited date (ascending) and go through old or not frequently edited documents and see what needs to be refreshed.

Use permission settings to prevent unwanted edits

You can adjust the permission settings of your wiki pages to ensure only certain people can make changes to content. Nominate team members who will be responsible for maintaining the wiki, and grant them full access. Everyone else can have “View only” access.
Learn more about permissions and sharing settings here.

Go beyond your team wiki

There are many possible ways to use the wiki feature, and you can essentially turn any page with sub-pages into a database, allowing you to add properties to those pages.

In addition to your team wiki, you could:

  • Build a company-wide wiki — Your organization’s wiki can include information about benefits, vacations, org charts, company goals, etc.

  • Create a customer help center wiki — You can create a public-facing help center where customers can find guides, tutorials, pricing pages and FAQs. This can reduce your support team’s workload and help users get more from your product or service. Learn about publishing pages to the web

  • Design an engineering process wiki — In your engineering team’s wiki, produce engineering-specific process documents like your triage process, design system, etc. The verification property will encourage your team to be more proactive about keeping all these process up-to-date.

  • Turn your client portal into a wiki — If you give clients access to a portal in Notion, you can make this into a wiki where it’s easier to filter and sort different information.

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