How to Make Your Enterprise Wiki Scale

Most enterprise wikis die the same way. Not with a dramatic crash, but with a slow fade into irrelevance. Someone searches for the onboarding checklist and gets 14 results, 11 of which are outdated. A new hire asks where the expense policy lives and three people point to three different pages. The wiki still works. People just stop trusting it.

We've watched this happen at hundreds of organizations. The wiki launches with energy. People write pages. Six months in, it's a graveyard with a search bar. The problem is almost never the software. It's that nobody thought about what happens when you go from 50 pages to 50,000.

Scaling a wiki is not a technology problem. It's an organization problem, a people problem, and a habits problem. Here's what actually works.

Everyone creates, nobody organizes

This is the root of almost every wiki failure.

In the first few months, people are excited. Teams create spaces. Managers write process docs. Someone uploads the employee handbook. Meeting notes pour in. The wiki fills up fast, and it feels like progress.

But nobody is thinking about where things go. Marketing creates a "Campaign Planning" page in one space, and then someone else creates "How We Plan Campaigns" in another. The sales team writes up their pricing process, but so does the finance team, and neither knows the other exists. Someone creates a page called "Notes" with no context about what meeting it's from or when it happened.

Multiply this by every team across a company of 500 people over 18 months and you have thousands of pages with no coherent structure. Content is scattered across spaces that were created on a whim. Duplicate pages contradict each other. Half the meeting notes have titles like "Sync" or "Standup" with no dates.

The wiki didn't fail because people stopped writing. It failed because nobody was paying attention to how the writing was organized. And by the time someone notices, the mess is so deep that fixing it feels impossible. So people stop looking. They open Slack and ask a human instead.

The 500-page wall

Every wiki hits a wall somewhere between 300 and 800 pages. Below that threshold, people can hold a rough mental map of where things live. They remember that Jessica wrote the onboarding guide, that HR stuff is somewhere under People Ops, that there's a page about the quarterly review process.

Above that threshold, the mental map breaks. People can't browse anymore. They rely entirely on search, and search only works if pages have clear titles, accurate content, and aren't duplicated across six different spaces.

This is where wikis either grow up or start dying. If you don't have structure and hygiene practices in place before you hit the wall, you're already behind.

Structure your wiki before you fill it

The instinct when launching a wiki is to get people writing. Fill it up. More content is better. This is wrong, or at least dangerously incomplete.

Before anyone writes a single page, you need a workspace structure that can absorb ten times your current content without collapsing. That means thinking about how you organize spaces and what goes where.

A flat wiki, everything in one big bucket, works for a team of eight. It does not work for a company of 800. You need deliberate top-level organization, and the most reliable approach is to mirror your organizational structure loosely while adding shared spaces for things that cross team boundaries.

For a mid-size company, that might look like:

• Engineering with sub-spaces for different teams
• Product for specs, roadmaps, and research
• People Ops for policies, onboarding, and benefits
• Company for strategy docs, all-hands notes, and the org chart
• Operations for processes that involve multiple teams

The key word is "loosely." Don't try to model your org chart perfectly. Teams merge, split, and rename themselves constantly. Your wiki structure should be stable enough that a reorg doesn't require moving hundreds of pages around.

Keep it shallow. Two or three levels of nesting is fine. Five levels deep and nobody will find anything. If you're nesting that deep, you probably need a separate space, not another subfolder.

Let people see everything (mostly)

Here's something that catches a lot of organizations off guard: the more you lock down your wiki, the harder it is to scale.

When teams restrict their spaces, people can't find information across boundaries. A project manager planning a cross-functional initiative can't see the process docs from another team because that space is private. Someone onboarding into a new role can't read the team's internal guides because nobody thought to grant them access.

The result is predictable. People start duplicating information in spaces they control. Now you have three versions of the travel policy and none of them agree.

Default to open. The vast majority of internal documentation doesn't need access controls. Yes, there are exceptions: HR records, compensation data, legal matters. Create restricted spaces for those specific cases. Everything else should be readable by anyone in the organization.

Companies that default to secrecy produce wikis full of locked rooms. Companies that default to transparency produce wikis that people actually use.

Search only works if your content is clean

Below 500 pages, browsing works. Above 5,000 pages, search is the only way anyone finds anything. If your search experience is bad, your wiki is bad.

But here's the thing most people miss: search quality is mostly a content quality problem, not a technology problem.

When pages have vague titles like "Notes" or "Process," search can't help you. When the same information exists on five pages across three spaces, search results become a wall of near-identical hits. When outdated pages rank alongside current ones, people lose confidence in what they find.

You fix search by fixing your content. Give pages clear, specific titles. Keep one authoritative version of important documents instead of letting copies drift apart. Archive old content so it stops cluttering results.

The technology side matters too. Good wiki search should rank recent content higher, prioritize title matches over body text matches, and let people filter by space. At Docmost, we've spent a lot of time on this because we've seen what happens when search breaks down. People stop searching. They walk over to someone's desk or ping a Slack channel. The wiki becomes write-only.

Someone has to own the mess

This is the part nobody wants to hear. A wiki without active maintenance will rot. Always. No exceptions.

"Governance" sounds like it means a committee and a 40-page policy document. It doesn't. It means answering three questions:

1. Who owns each space?
2. When does content get reviewed?
3. What happens to pages that go stale?

That's it. You don't need a committee. You need named owners.

Every space should have one person responsible for it. Not a team, not an alias, a specific person. That person keeps the space tidy, archives outdated pages, and checks in every quarter to make sure the structure still makes sense. This takes maybe an hour a month. It's not a big job, but it has to be somebody's job, or it won't happen.

For content review, the simplest system that works: flag pages that haven't been touched in six months. Send the space owner a list. They spend 30 minutes deciding what's still accurate, what needs a refresh, and what should be archived. Do this quarterly and you'll stay ahead of the rot.

Archiving is where people get squeamish. Nobody wants to archive pages because what if someone needs it later? But a wiki where everything is kept forever is a wiki where nothing can be found. Stale content doesn't just sit there harmlessly. It actively hurts the wiki by clogging search results and confusing people who can't tell if what they're reading is still true.

Archive aggressively. If a page hasn't been viewed or edited in a year and the space owner confirms it's outdated, move it to an archive space. It's not deleted. It can still be found if someone specifically looks. But it's out of the main navigation and out of search results, which is where it needs to be.

Templates solve the consistency problem

You can't train 500 people to write well-organized wiki pages. You can give them templates that make it hard to write disorganized ones.

A meeting notes template with fields for date, attendees, decisions, and action items produces useful pages every time without anyone thinking about format. A project kickoff template that asks for goals, timeline, stakeholders, and dependencies gives you pages that are still useful three months later when someone needs to understand what was decided and why.

Templates work because they reduce the number of decisions someone has to make when creating a page. A blank page is intimidating and produces wildly inconsistent results. A template with clear sections produces pages that are structured and searchable.

Beyond templates, establish a few simple conventions and stick to them:

• Page titles should be specific. "Notes" is useless. "2024-03-15 Q2 planning sync, decisions on hiring timeline" tells you exactly what you're looking at.
• Use headers. They make pages scannable and they improve search results.
• Link to related pages. Internal links are the connective tissue of a wiki. A page that links to nothing is an island.

Don't write a long style guide for this. Five bullet points on a wiki page, and people leading by example, will do more than any formal documentation standard.

How to tell if your wiki is actually working

Most companies measure wiki success by vanity metrics. Page views, active editors, pages created per week. These numbers feel good but they tell you very little. A wiki with 10,000 pages and climbing might still be completely dysfunctional if nobody can find what they need.

Better questions to ask:

How often do people ask questions in Slack or email that have answers in the wiki? Every one of those questions is a small wiki failure. Sometimes the content doesn't exist. More often it exists but people can't find it, don't trust it, or didn't know to look.

How many pages haven't been updated in over a year? If the answer is "most of them," your wiki is collecting dust, not knowledge.

How many spaces have no clear owner? Unowned spaces are where content goes to die.

How many duplicate pages exist for the same topic? If your wiki has three different "How to submit expenses" pages, you have a content management problem that no amount of adoption cheerleading will fix.

The fix is never to yell at people for not using the wiki. The fix is to make the wiki so reliable and easy to navigate that using it is faster than asking a coworker.

Scaling is a long game

You won't get your wiki structure right at launch. You'll make organizational decisions that seem smart at 200 pages and look terrible at 5,000. That's normal. Build in the expectation that you'll reorganize and restructure periodically. Treat it like spring cleaning, not a crisis.

The organizations that succeed with wikis at scale are the ones that treat the wiki like a product. It has owners. It gets maintained. Someone pays attention to whether people can actually find things in it. It changes as the organization changes.

The ones that fail treat it like a filing cabinet. Set it up once, throw documents in, forget about it until someone complains that they can't find the vacation policy.

A wiki at scale is only as good as the worst experience someone has trying to use it. One bad search result, one outdated page presented as current, one confusing space structure, and you've lost someone's trust. Getting that trust back takes far longer than keeping it in the first place.

Scale isn't about handling more pages. It's about handling more pages without losing the thing that makes a wiki useful: the ability to find the right information quickly, every time.