Wiki in Modern Page format

[Osman Beyaztas]

When adding a Wiki page/app, Sharepoint is going back to version 1900.

Am i doing something wrong? Or is the Wiki page/app not being changed into Modern Page layout?

[#2]

I haven't seen communication of what'll happen with SharePoint wiki pages, but, is there something about specific to a Wiki page that can't be accomplished by a Modern site page?

[#3]

There is not a modern wiki replacement for the classic one so you can just only create modern pages and use the modern text WebPart

[#4]

@Osman Beyaztas 

Found this recent reply from Microsoft on their SharePoint UserVoice page:

We know wikis are critical to sharing knowledge within your organization! We’ve been slowly building capabilities to share information more easily with our focus on modern pages and web parts. And with that work, we’ve been adding some of the capabilities we hear you want when people refer to wikis (easily add links to other pages or content, add metadata to each page to help people find and categorize it, roll-up content based on that metadata to show groupings of like content, etc.) But we know this isn’t all that’s required to have a great wiki. Many people also want wiki linking syntax e.g. [[]], we don’t yet support that, but we do support ctrl/command + K from the text web part to search and find pages on your site. We’ll be working on adding wiki syntax shortly. We know you also need easy roll-up pages, maybe an index page, etc. 
In short, we’re still working on what it will take to make a great wiki experience leveraging the building blocks of web parts and modern pages. If you have specific ideas about what you need/want, we’d love to hear them. Please add detailed comments to help us frame what you need for our MVP.

https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/7915317-a-total-r...

So sounds like the wiki functionality might be replaced by better modern pages and web parts.

[#5]

I added a wiki as an app in Teams the other day and it's super simple and perfect for my needs.  Was hoping it was that easy to add to Sharepoint as well, but I'm beginning to learn that it's not.  😞  

@stiansvendsen 

[#6]

@Osman Beyaztas 

Until there is an "easy" button for building out Modern SharePoint Wiki's, I found this video for creating "a" modern SharePoint Wiki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWBGX4qc_mU&t=69s.  Essentially building pages linked to each other and creating the breadcrumbs with a series of hyperlinks and text webpart.  Seems like a lot of work, but for site designers--may be fun!

[#7]

This is not ideal. We need what every other Wiki does. A simple tree structure navigation. It should be as simple as having a 'top parent page' field on every page. Then, have a setting in the page library to show a tree index, built from this information. 

Right now, creating this is a nightmare, because you have to build the navigation alongside the content!

[#8]

@XabiBeltza You can easily do this by creating metadata exactly as you describe. You could use a "lookup" field to connect pages to their logical parent and/or you can create a Topic column to connect similar pages together. You can then use the Highlighted Content web part to pull all related pages together. If you want pages to sort in a particular order - or at least easily identify the "parent" in each "family," you can add a number to the parent page title - e.g. 01-Name of Page. To connect pages to one another in line, you can use standard wiki notation [[ ]].

[#9]

@XabiBeltza 

Totally agree.  Just sharing a very detailed and an alternate way of creating a Modern Wiki Library experience for end-users I found beneficial.  For any step of the tutorial, solutions can be altered...or eliminated to fit whatever use-case is required.  I find it fun to implement the given alternative...but hey...that's me.

[#10]

Compared to dedicated wiki products like Wikidot and others, Microsft has always been utterly rubbish at wikis.

[#11]

@Osman Beyaztas We've been able to get pretty close. We needed to move a lot of content from Confluence so we created a nav part via SpFX and setup our structure using managed metadata. We created templates with the appropriate metadata webparts as well as a TOC web part. We are extending visibility with Viva Topics consuming these pages and documents.

https://i.imgur.com/9LPjOuD.gif

[#12]

@Jaymz Yates this looks great! Could you give some more details how you've set this up and what's the function and role of the nav part?

[#13]

@Jaymz Yates I'm trying to create a knowledge database for my team, but we're a nonprofit without a web developer. Your solution looks really elegant, but an out-of-the-box solution is something that we really need.

[#14]

very slick, jaymz!

[#15]

Thats exactly NOT what every other Wiki does.
Wikipedia the most famous wiki on earth doesn't do that - The tree index is something that you expect to see in some guides, but is not a wiki.

The entire idea of a wiki - is that you do not need a hierarchy and ALL of the content is flat and searchable.

[#16]

I have been building a knowledgebase site in sharepoint at the moment. There are some nice pnp webparts that one can build for building page indexes. They fill a bit of a gap for building a knowledgebase within SPO. Not a true wiki as mentioned above but it's probably as good as you'll get it in SPO without some more specific custom development.

https://github.com/pnp/sp-dev-fx-webparts/tree/main/samples/react-page-navigator
https://github.com/pnp/sp-dev-fx-webparts/tree/main/samples/react-pages-hierarchy

A bit of a learning curve on building these packages but I'm no developer and I managed to get it working.

[#17]

Thanks @BravoJuliet! This is very close to what we need. I just wished this was part of native functionality:
- A property for parent folder
- A hierarchical navigation tree

[#18]

Yeah, the pages hierarchy webpart has a navigation tree structure layout now as well (not shown in that animated gif).
You just specify the ID of the page for the top of the hierarchy and it builds the tree down from that start point.

So just need to create the parent landing pages, build page templates for each parent category and the hierarchy/breadcrumbs are all dynamically generated. Makes a huge difference and was the one thing imo that SPO lacks to make KBs actually usable. As you say, I don't know why this isn't native functionality.

Full credit to the devs on github for those two webparts. There's some amazing work over there on the PNP github.