A Wiki is a website built to share information amongst the users and viewers. Unlike Blogs and Social Media websites, a Wiki website is built for users to be able to enter new information based on their accord or judge pre-existing information. Thus, if someone had to define a Wiki, they’d define it as a community-based information sharing website. The idea behind a WordPress wiki is to build a Wiki website that makes full use of WordPress’s amazing content organization and management system.
By itself, WordPress is not the ideal platform to build a Wiki. It doesn’t have the right set of tools to support this user-submitted content management platform. However, what WordPress does have is its flexibility. There is a wide range of plugins and themes out there built specifically for creating WordPress wikis. This is the topic we will be tackling today as we will be showing you the process of creating a Wiki website using a WordPress Wiki plugin.
Creating a WordPress Wiki website
Now before we build our Wiki website on WordPress, let’s take a look at some of the most important elements of a Wiki. This includes a Wiki requires to actually function as a Wiki and how WordPress and its components complement them.
- Well organized Grid-based structure
- Properly categorized Page hierarchy and Subtopics
- Navigational links throughout the website and its pages
- Features to allow users to edit the posts
- Features for an Account system to check and log changes
- Clear outlining of rules and regulations
- Admin system to regulate the content management and editing
While WordPress doesn’t itself have the inbuilt features to support these elements, we can make use of amazing WordPress plugins to set up well categorized Wikis. However, before we start, we’ll need to set up a few things for our WordPress wiki.
WordPress Wiki Plugins
First of all, we’ll need to use a theme that’s compatible with a Wiki design. This includes the grid-based, structured layout that a Knowledgebase or Wiki might contain. This whole package is built to make sure your entire website functions efficiently as a Wiki or a Knowledgebase.
You are free to use specifically made for WordPress themes. These themes feature layouts, linking features and other such options designed for Wikis and Support pages. However, if you want your Wiki to blend in with your site designs without changing theme settings, we’d recommend using a WordPress plugin instead. This lets you use any theme or your pre-existing theme designs along with various tools to build your Wiki the way you want. Using knowledge base plugins to manage your content, categories and
While using WordPress themes is a viable option and is a full solution, we’ll be discussing how to create a Knowledgebase or Support page utilizing a wiki plugin for WordPress. There are a wide range of Wiki plugins that can have different features. Thus our readers might feel lost searching for an appropriate one. So we’ve listed out some of our recommendations for WordPress Wiki plugins:
1. Yada Wiki
Yada wiki is a free WordPress plugin made to help you create a dedicated Wiki section for your website. The plugin lets you build an amazing knowledge base, Wikis and Support channels using a mix of custom post types, custom tags and categories. Creating Wiki pages and Category structures on Yada wiki is extremely easy and flexible. Furthermore, you can also place Wiki links in Wiki pages as well as posts all over websites.
Yada Wiki also lets you place Wiki listing sections to build a table of content, detailed category lists and Indexes which is crucial for any Knowledgebase or Wiki website. Yada Wiki also comes with a nifty widget that lets you place Table of contents or Wiki article indexes on your sidebars as well.
Key features:
- Easy to setup Wiki pages and Categories
- Lets you add and customize Wiki links
- Easy to customize Wiki listings and indexes
2. Encyclopedia / Glossary / Wiki plugin
This plugin features all the tools you might need to create well detailed and easy to use support sites, customized Knowledgebase and interactive Wikis. The plugin lets you easily organize all your pages and listings as well as cross-link them if necessary. This saves a lot of hassle and time for you. Each item is given its Wiki page with a custom URL.
While you can easily set up the necessary tags and categories, Encyclopedia also lets you enable prefix filters for items on your index and archives pages. Your Wiki items can be enabled with Automatic association with other items with the same tags as well as Automatic cross-linking in the posts. You can enable Page comments, featured images as thumbnails, excerpts, RSS feeds and more. The plugin is fully WPLM compatible and has translation-ready features for a lot of languages.
Key features:
- A complete package for creating detailed Wiki pages with automatic cross-linking and indexing
- Easy to manage categories and tags and enable the Automatic association to connect different wiki pages
- Supports User rights management system as well integration of multimedia content
3. BuddyPress Docs
BuddyPress Docs is a part Wiki creating, part Community collaborative project tool. Using the plugin, you can share docs and pages and allow users to edit with various ranges of Privacy levels. These documents can be well categorized and tagged to create a well-defined Taxonomy for your Knowledgebase and Wiki sites. The documents can be easily sorted, filtered and managed. The inbuilt TinyMCE front end doc editor allows users to edit the pages and docs straight from the front easily. These changes can be tracked using the revising history.
To well-managed community collaboration, you can enable one at a time editing setting as well as Idle detection. Complete Doc management and Dashboard access can be given to admins and users can also upload Fully private documents if necessary.
Key features:
- Made for collaborative Wiki and Doc projects.
- Comes with user editing and management options for doc editing.
- Front-end doc editing with Idle detection, autosaving and One at a time doc editing.
For this demonstration, we’ll be using Yada Wiki. Moreover, let’s take a look at some of the options that you can enable in Yada wiki before we start building our WordPress Wiki. However, This requires the installation of the plugin first. If you’re unsure about how to install the plugin, feel free to check out this useful article.
Using Yada Wiki to create a WordPress Wiki
Yada Wiki Options
Before we start using Yada Wiki to create our WordPress Wiki, let’s refer to its settings so we can enable some of its nifty features that are disabled by default.
To check the settings for Yada Wiki, refer to WordPress Admin’s Dashboard and click on Settings. Then click on the Yada Wiki to open its options. 
Here you can enable the following options:
- Enable Comments option: To allow users to comment on your Wiki pages, this can be turned off individually on each Wiki page.
- On New Wiki Page allow comments: By default allow Comments on all new Wiki pages.
- On new wiki page: allow trackbacks and pingbacks checked by default: Enables the Trackback and Pingback option on new Wiki pages by default. This option is for notifying you when a new crosslink to your pages has been created.
- Show Wiki Shortcode: Lets you enable Shortcodes for placing Regular posts and pages in Wiki pages.
- Change Wiki Slug: Lets you rename the Slug for the Wiki section of your website.
Once the appropriate settings are enabled, these fields will show up in your Wiki pages( which will be discussed below.)
When you’re done changing the settings, click on Save changes to save the changes to your Yada wiki settings.
Building Basic Wiki Categories, Taxonomy and Index
A good interlinked, well tagged and categorized structure is the core foundation of a Wiki. If you build a Knowledgebase or a Wiki, you want all the content to 
Using these Crosslinks, we’d recommend you create an Index table or a Table of contents. All you’ll possibly have to do is create hierarchical Yada links to your Wiki pages and insert them into a Wiki page named TOC.
Similarly, you can cross-link a Table of Content into any of your Wiki pages by also using a shortcode provided by Yada link. However, this requires you to have a Wiki page titled TOC.
For this use the Add Wiki linking button provided to you in the toolbar. Then on the listing type choose the option Output TOC page and click on Insert shortcode. This will post the shortcode [yadawikitoc show_toc=”true”] on the selected location.
Using this shortcode, your Wiki page labelled TOC will now appear on the Wiki page where you insert this shortcode.
Concluding:
Thus using WordPress Wiki plugins you can set up distinctive WordPress Wiki and Knowledgebase inside your website. Do remember to make good use of Crosslinking and creating Table of contents as well as Widgets available for most plugins. Some plugins also let you create user account systems to allowing Front-end editing of the pages. However, this can also be blocked behind a paywall and thus will not come for free of cost.
As we’ve talked before WordPress is an extremely versatile content management tool. You can create websites of varying designs and purposes using WordPress. We recommend you check out some of our other articles to learn more about these: