Category Direction - Wiki

Wiki

Wiki


Stage	Create
Maturity	Viable
Content Last Reviewed	`2020-08-18`

Introduction and how you can help

Thanks for visiting the Wiki category direction page in GitLab. This page belongs to the Knowledge group of the Create stage and is maintained by Christen Dybenko (E-Mail).

This strategy is a work in progress, and everyone can contribute:

Please comment and contribute in the linked issues and epics on this page. Sharing your feedback directly on GitLab.com is the best way to contribute to our strategy and vision.
Please share feedback directly via email, Twitter, or on a video call. If you're a GitLab user and have direct knowledge of your need for Wiki, we'd especially love to hear from you.

Overview

GitLab Wikis are a great way to share documentation and organize information via built-in functionality. Each GitLab project includes a Wiki rendered by Gollum, and backed by a Git repository.

Walkthrough of GitLab wikis (starts at 9 minutes):

Where we are Headed

In 2020 we'll be tackling Group Level Wikis which will give our organizations the ability to collaborate in a shared wiki that spans multiple projects. (This is currently the most upvoted issue on GitLab!) We will also be tackling issues around markdown rendering and tidying up navigation in the Wiki.

We are beginning to explore a Confluence integration and testing Confluence Cloud withour own projects. Work on this can be seen in this epic.

As we look to future plans beyond 2020, we will be aiming for real time WYSIWYG collaboration (similar to Google Docs). This would solve the problem of collaborative note taking, be highly approachable for non-technical users, but have the tremendous benefits of storing the content in a portable plain text format that can be cloned, viewed and edited locally (properties of Git).

Target Audience and Experience

All personas can use Wikis for storing information
We may need to investigae a non-technical persona as our reserach found they are often users of wikis

What's Next & Why

Next: Group level wiki - Currently wiki's are only on the project level. Next we are movoing them to Group level and making them container agnostic so we can expand on this and add them as a Global Wiki.

Currently we are working on:

Next: Improve AsciiDoc, RDoc and reStructuredText - Many of our custmoers rely on specific formats to support their wikis. We should make sure our wiki's suppport these formats so that they can use their Group Level wikis as a company.

After: Simplify wiki editing - Currently wiki editing is inconsistent with every other page, both visually and from a workflow perspective. This makes wiki less approachable for users familiar with the rest of GitLab. We should fix these inconsistencies as a priority.

After: Improve wiki navigation - As wikis grow with more and more content, GitLab is not providing the tools necessary to make them easy to navigate and use. This is a problem that can be resolved with support for macros and a few other small improvements. We're adding a layer of meta data into wiki pages that will help us with search and navigation and exploring how to upgrade wiki search.

Later: Deeper integration of wikis with GitLab Once the immediate useability is addressed by the epics above, next we make sure that Wiki's can embed Issues, Designs or display other objects from GitLab.

What is Not Planned Right Now

Right now, we are not working on WYSIWYG and Live Editing, but instead setting the stage with our architecture and cleaning up the existing experience. We expect to dive into editing features later in 2020.