My physics department has a departmental handbook, which describes how the department is organized, what its aims are, details of the department's policies and practices, and so on. Maintaining the handbook presents a lot of problems. We try to ensure different members of the department complete different parts, but it is very difficult to collate these when they have been written. How can we make ownership of the report truly collective? The task of putting together our handbook, as well as all the other documentation we need, often detracts us from doing our actual job (teaching!). How do we show the subject inspector that we are really working together as a team creating our departmental documentation?

An elegant solution is to turn departmental documentation into a wiki. "Wiki" is Hawaiian for quick (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki), and a wiki is a quick way of creating web pages and linking them together. Not only that but you can work on the web...