Managing Corporate Wikis - to QA or not to QA

That is truly the question. Should I, as a manager of a corporate wiki, develop and implement a Quality Assurance (QA) process when users submit content for publishing? A corporate or in-house wiki is not the same as a public wiki such as Wikipedia and more can be done to make the content effective.

For example, Wikipedia's authors (everyone) do not have access to the base file structure. In a corporate wiki, if you allow users the ability to create pages at will, the base file structure may be vulnerable to accidental deletion. Should you implement file backup procedures? Should there be a publishing staging area where content sits while it is being reviewed and approved thereby creating a possible automatic backup and restore point?

Wikipedia does not provide templates for authors. In a corporate wiki environment, the authors can be guided to templates that already support corporate guidelines like headers, footers, typeface, body length, and special sections including "see also" and "for more information, contact x." A template can make the page creation process much smoother for the corporate employee who is just trying to publish content quickly and does not have time to research and apply the guidelines.
Quality Assurance exists to make sure content meets guidelines whatever those guidelines might be. Suppose you don't want duplicate content to exist on your corporate wiki or you want to make sure content is easy to find by the intended audience. One way to weed out duplicate content is to avoid publishing it in the first place. The QA governing body could review proposed content, determine the subject matter, then search the wiki to see if such subject matter exists already. If the content is exactly the same, the proposed content is not published. Likewise the QA governing body could add metatags or identify which keywords an audience is likely to use when searching for a particular piece of content and then make sure the search function first looks for keywords before executing a full-text search.

What guidelines are you most likely to want to enforce with a QA process? It is entirely up to your unique organization, the type of content being submitted, the authors, viewers, and corporate policy. Perhaps the best QA is to leave it up to the viewers. That is, open up the pages to everyone in read/write mode. When a viewer recognizes outdated, incorrect, or inconsistent content, it is up to that person to make the correction.