How to build a wiki for your engineering team

With the right tool, organizing all your team's important information in one place is pretty simple.

But from where you sit now, it probably feels daunting. Information may be scattered. It may be out of date. It may feel like an overpacked suitcase, where you have to pull out everything just to find the right pair of socks.

Trust us. Investing time in building a single, central engineering wiki will pay longterm dividends. Because a bad organizational system snowballs, and it can lead to inefficient work — time wasted looking for the right thing, outdated info, duplicative projects, incorrect processes.

Here, we'll walk you through building your own engineering wiki using Notion (you might also call it a knowledge base), and how it can unlock a better workflow for your team.

Here's just one example of what your finished product could look like:

Ask yourself: where does all your team's information live? If the answer includes multiple destinations, your team probably lacks a central source of truth for documents that are essential to working effectively.

You deserve one reliable resource for:

• Code style guidelines, your triage rotation, and infrastructure information — all up to date and easily accessible by everyone on your team.

• Onboarding resources for new engineers to help them get spun up and productive fast.

• Pages specific to the various projects going on inside your engineering team so everyone stays in the know about who's working on what.

No wiki means no hub for this information, which could have downstream effects. Information gets siloed so no one has a complete picture of what's going on. More meetings and conversations get scheduled because that information isn't findable. Work gets inaccurate and inconsistent because an engineer has been using an outdated style guide.

An organized and accessible wiki helps alleviate these problems. No more sifting through graveyards of documents all called the same thing (which are probably stale and outdated, anyway).

Everyone on your team knows where to find what they need, so your team can focus on what's important.

Let's start with a few basics and work our way up from there.

This is the starting point for just about everything you do in Notion. A page can contain anything — text, lists, videos, images, databases and more. Your wiki is a page you'll add other pages to.

To create a page, just hit the + sign next to WORKSPACE in your sidebar. If you're already inside a page, simply hit / and type page then press enter. Every time you hit /, you'll see your full menu of content options — we call this a "slash command."

Here's the crux of making a wiki — you can have many pages inside of one page.

For example, inside your main Engineering page, you can have separate pages for your code repository, team meeting notes, testing guidelines and more. Each of these pages becomes a resource for your team and can live side-by-side.

• To make one, type /page and press enter. Your new page will pop up, where you can give it a title and add any content. Use the back button to return to your wiki.

• To make many pages at once, list all the page names you want as text. Now select them all, click the ⋮⋮ icon that appears on hover, click Turn Into and select Page.

This way, all the parts of your engineering organization live in one place. Your team doesn't have to go on a scavenger hunt anytime they need something — they know to start at your wiki.

You now have the bones of a wiki. Time to organize it.

Let's organize your wiki for ultimate usability.

You can start with headers. Using / again, select from H1 (the largest), H2 or H3 (the smallest) headers. Now you can use the drag-and-drop feature to organize the pages in your workspace.

• First, use drag-and-drop to create columns. Grab the ⋮⋮ icon next to your header, and drag it all the way to the far right to create another column. The blue guides will help you.

• To add divider lines under your headers for a polished look, simply type three hyphens in a row.

• Now, again using ⋮⋮, grab any pages and drag them into the sections where they belong.

A category like "Infrastructure" might include "AWS" and "Redis" pages. All engineering teams are different, and Notion allows you to customize your wiki based on your team's needs.

Everything is accessible within a click or two. So forget about hunting for documents.