Wiki

What a Wiki room is

A Wiki room is a markdown knowledge base. You write plain markdown on one side of the screen and watch the rendered page appear on the other as you type — GitHub-flavored, so code blocks, tables, and lists render exactly the way engineers expect from READMEs and pull requests. It's built for the reference pages a team returns to for years: runbooks, API conventions, style guides, the handbook.

Add a Wiki room

1. In the space's sidebar, click + and pick the Wiki room type.
2. Name it and set visibility — engineering's wiki can be engineering's alone, or open to the whole space.

Write a page

Create a page and write markdown. The live preview sits beside the source and updates as you type: no mode switching, no separate preview tab, no surprises at publish time. What you see on the right is exactly what readers get.

The dialect is GitHub-flavored markdown, so everything your team already writes daily carries over:

• Fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting for runbook commands and samples
• Tables for reference matrices
• Lists, headings, and links for structure

If your team writes pull request descriptions, they already know how to contribute — there is nothing new to learn.

Underneath, pages are plain text. Markdown is portable and diff-friendly, so your knowledge base is never locked into a proprietary format.

What belongs in a wiki

Wiki suits content that is written once and consulted many times:

• Runbooks — the on-call page the whole team can find at 3am, with the exact commands in code blocks.
• Conventions — API and code conventions in the format engineers already write.
• Style guides — with code samples that render correctly in the preview.
• The handbook — team processes moved out of a shared drive into searchable pages.

For collaborative drafts, specs, and meeting notes, a Docs room's block editor is usually the better fit — spaces can hold both.

Find wiki pages

Wiki pages are reachable through Openbook's global command-K search, which reaches across your workspace. A runbook is only useful if it surfaces the moment someone needs it — descriptive page titles make search work harder for you.

Publish a page

Any page can be turned into a read-only web page anyone with the link can open, with no account and no sign-in.

1. Open the page and choose Share.
2. Switch publishing on. A link of the form /doc/<token> appears; copy it.

Publishing a page publishes its content, in full. Unlike a Kanban board there is no sub-field to hold back, so the dialog is the switch and the link and nothing else. What does not travel is everything around the page: the room it lives in, its place in the tree, and its comments.

Switching publishing off makes the link stop working immediately, and switching it back on restores the same link. To revoke a URL that has already gone somewhere you regret, rotate the token — that breaks every copy of the old link at once.

The token is the credential. Anyone holding the link can read the page, so treat the URL itself as the secret.

Keep it current

A wiki earns trust by being right. Some habits that keep it that way:

• Fix small errors the moment you spot them — plain markdown makes edits cheap.
• When an incident reveals a gap in a runbook, update the page as part of closing the incident.
• Date time-sensitive content in the page body so readers can judge freshness.

FAQ

Why markdown instead of a rich editor? Markdown is fast to write, easy to review, and never mangled by formatting quirks — for technical teams it's the native tongue. If your team prefers a block editor, use a Docs room instead; Openbook has both.

Do I have to preview in a separate tab? No. The preview is side by side with the source and updates live as you type, GitHub-flavored, so code blocks and tables render exactly as readers will see them.

Who should use Wiki vs Docs? Wiki for people who think in markdown and for durable reference — runbooks, conventions. Docs for block-editor writing — specs, notes. There's no wrong answer; pick per team, per room.

Can we restrict who sees the wiki? Yes. Per-room visibility plus Owner, Admin, Member, and Viewer roles let you open a wiki to everyone or limit it to certain people.