Most of us are familiar with the wiki style of organizing and collaborating on content; if you’re not, check out this Wikipedia article about wikis! (Wiki-ception?)

But did you know that the default type of page on a SharePoint site is considered a wiki? Your admin may not have chosen to maintain the wiki style of all SharePoint pages, but you might encounter a wiki as you work on some portion of your team site. SharePoint wikis can be added to, edited, or linked to/within, all without any special editing tools.

Here‘s what Microsoft suggests for types of content that would work well for a wiki site:

A corporation can create a company-wide Enterprise wiki where employees can find and contribute the latest, most comprehensive information about corporate activities, benefits, and services. Or your team can use a wiki to collect information for new team members, to plan a conference, or to collect ideas for a large document or manual.

If you have permissions to create a site, library, or pages in SharePoint, you can create a wiki. (For more details, see the “Who can create a wiki?” section here–SharePoint permissioning can get complicated.) Check out the instructions below, or the video demo above.

To create a wiki page library on your team site:

1. Click the settings gear and select Add an app.
2. On the Apps page, select Wiki Page Library. You may have to scroll through several pages of options, or you can search.
3. In the Name box, type a name for your library.
4. Click Create.

You can configure settings for your new library by going to the library and clicking Page in the header.

To create an Enterprise wiki site:

Before creating an Enterprise wiki, Microsoft recommends thinking about whether it’s the best solution for your organization. You may wish to do more researching on planning and creating sites and site collections, as a full-scale Enterprise wiki should be created as its own site collection. These instructions (and the video above) show how to create an Enterprise wiki as a subsite.

1. On the site where you wish to create an Enterprise wiki, click the settings gear and choose Site contents.
2. Click new subsite.
3. On the New SharePoint Site page, add a Title and URL name for the site.
4. In the Template Selection section, click Publishing and then Enterprise Wiki site template.
5. Click Use unique permissions if you need to set unique permissions.
6. Click Create.

Notes about the process above:

• The Publishing tab won’t appear if publishing features aren’t enabled at the site collection level. According to Microsoft, “Your site collection administrator needs to enable the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature on the site collection to make publishing-related templates available in the site.”
• You can configure site permissions and other settings for your Enterprise wiki later from the Settings menu in the header.

Once you’ve created the page, you’ll see sample content about wikis. You can edit and replace with your own content; it’s recommended that you start by editing the home page and adding placeholder links to pages you’ll create later. Happy wiki-ing!