Organizing Information using a Wiki

This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my advertiser disclosure for more details.  

One of the downsides about having a lot of ongoing technology projects in our home is that, go figure, things can break! Error messages, equipment troubles, signals that randomly get interrupted. You name it, it happens. And sometimes it can take a while to figure out what is broken and how to fix it. But then, 18 months later, we experience the same problem again! Only to have forgotten the solution we figured out over a year earlier!

That’s when we came up with the idea of a house wiki. It’s like Wikipedia, but on a much smaller scale. And only for us! When Ken troubleshoots something on, for instance, our arcade, he’ll type up a brief description of the problem and the solution on the Arcade page on our house wiki. Or, he’ll enter the different coding lines for different aspects of our video distribution system.  We have all the instructions for registering a new domain using our domain registrar service and setting it up using our hosting service (which, of course, begs the question … why are we always registering so many domains that we need to memorialize instructions for it!?)

We’ve also expanded the use of our house wiki for other things. There’s a page that lists all our frequent flyer and hotel loyalty numbers. There’s a page with our health insurance information, packing lists, and even a page dedicated to all the details and itineraries for future and past vacations.

I’m a die-hard spreadsheet fa

n, and Ken and I continue to share different documents and spreadsheets with each other on Google Docs, but I must say that there are some HUGE benefits to keeping things organized on a house wiki instead of in a bunch of spreadsheets.

Does anyone else organize their personal lives using a wiki?