How should the information be organized in a wiki

Ever since the introduction of wiki to my organization, it has take on an explosive growth rate that I am receiving requests for new spaces on a regular basis. A space is a grouping of pages which has the same topic and also the same set of access permissions. A space can be used as a project space within the team or a portal site to disseminate information to other teams.

The idea of spaces is analogous to books volumes within a library and it comprises of pages contributed by various authors.

By organizing the wikis into collections of spaces:

Advantages of using spaces

1. Ease of searching - because contents with a common topic are grouped together. People can zoom in the correct information by searching within a space instead of the all the spaces in the wikis
2. Ease of monitoring - people will be able to track changes within the spaces via email alerts or RSS. This will allow close collaboration within a project without getting spammed by other noise.
3. Ease of access control - it will be much easier to manage permission control for all the pages instead of having to set permission for each and every pages
4. Ease in processing statistics- It will be faster to process and aggregate the information in the space (e.g top 10 visited pages), if the number of pages is smaller as compared to 1 spaces with all the pages inside.

Disadvantags of using spaces

1. Need for knowledge of structure - An author will need to have a good understanding of the structure of the wiki to determine which spaces to contribute his articles to.
2. Searching - As the number of spaces increased, users will start to have difficulty to identify the spaces to search for the required information. Thus the benefits of searching within space mentioned above will be diminished.
3. Need for knowledge of access control policy - Because there is a permission control policy tied with the space, the users will need to know who are the ones with access permissions before deciding to posting sensitive information into the spaces. It might cause the same information to be duplicated into multiple spaces in order to present

My recommendations to tackle this issue will be to have a few super big spaces organized by topic where access control is not an issues. This will facilitate exchange of information easily

For smaller spaces with more stringent requirements, they will be organized by the access control which usually is. Their access control will be limited to a smaller group to prevent overloading of information to others and ease management. Users can then use RSS or email tracking for closer level of collaboration.

Spaces that are out of use should be archived to restrict addition of new information so that the users will be limited on the spaces to contribute in or search from.