Enterprise wiki site collection VS wiki library

Question

I am in a point to decide which approach I should follow for building a wiki site for our company , the wiki need to have the following features:

• Create wiki pages and add related metadata info. This metadata info includes such things as the built-in wiki category in addition to other columns.
• Enable metadata navigation and filtering, to be able to click on certain terms and get the related wiki pages.

Now I cannot decide which approach to follow, either:

1. Create new site collection of type Enterprise wiki.
2. Or inside my current team site to just add a wiki library?

From my own testing, I found the following differences:

1. Inside the enterprise wiki site collection, you can add the metadata info such as the built-in wiki category on the same page when you add/edit the wiki page body, while in the wiki page library case you have to edit the wiki page properties to add the related metadata.

2. Both approaches allow metadata navigation and filtering and creating wiki pages from other pages by typing [[pagename]].

3. One of the main differences is that if I enable “mobile view” feature , then I can view the wiki library pages inside the mobile devices in a mobile friendly manner, while in the enterprise wiki site collection the wiki page body will be rendered as a white empty section. Not sure if there is a way to fix this in the enterprise wiki, but for me this is a big advantage for the wiki library over enterprise wiki site collection, which is mobile view support.

Answer 1

John,

I found a few helpful links on comparing the two options. I think the most important difference you may want to consider is the metadata implementation. The library option looks to be more restrictive.

While you can manually add metadata to Wiki Page Library, you can’t add the fields to the text layouts. This means users would have to edit the content of the page, then separately edit the properties of the page to enter metadata, which is not good for encouraging metadata entry.

Differences between Enterprise Wiki and Wiki Page Library in SharePoint 2013

Some other things to consider and what Microsoft suggest based on what you may want to accomplish.

Comparison of Enterprise Wikis with Team Sites

Answer 2

I much prefer using a team site and use existing site features and apps to get the same effect that a specialized site template gives you, excluding the very specialized things like records center, video portal, etc.

You said it yourself, mobile is key, they both methods create content the same way, both can have mmetadata navigation and filtering, and the only difference is how the metadata tagging is done, which isn't really a big deal and is easily overcome with communication. People are accustomed to doing that aready with other lists and libraries.

I prefer flexibility over specialization, so I lean towards team sites as the basis for about 99% of my sites.