Last week I had the chance to chat with some folks at Microsoft Italy about STW. They wonder why wikis don’t really take off. I mean, they did take off after all, but they could be used much more widely (and wisely).
My personal opinion is that wikis are a valuable knowledge sharing tool, but they are still too cumbersome to use. It’s not writing stuff, but it’s managing information that is hard. Sharing and discussing ideas, documenting processes and sharing files are all very easy tasks. When your wiki is small.
The biggest single problem with wikis is that keeping them tide and clean is very, very difficult. With dozens users and hundreds or thousands pages, you absolutely need a strong discipline in every single participant, otherwise the thing will simply run out of control in no time. The hard part is making users understand when and how they should create new pages, how to categorize them and how to upload and share files and documents.
We geeks take these things seriously, so for a team of software developers maintaining a wiki is pretty straightforward. But what about “normal” people?
Here are a few tips for keeping a wiki that make sense (using ScrewTurn Wiki, obviously):
- define namespaces upfront, making pondered decisions; this step really depends on the content of your wiki, but try not to mix areas maintained by different groups
- define a small set of rules for creating new pages, for categorizing them and for managing files/attachments, that are valid for everyone that uses the wiki
- link/insert such rules in the main page of each namespace, as well as in the editing screen (see the Content Editing tab in the admin interface)
- as a wiki administrator, subscribe to RSS or email notifications for all namespaces (so you catch errors and broken edits immediately)
- review the rules every once in a while, to adapt them to the patterns that will emerge during the lifetime of the wiki
- evaluate whether to “personalize” rules for each group in the wiki, because most probably each group of people will use the wiki in a slightly different way
- avoid to lock the wiki down, at least at the beginning, because most people will not even think about editing pages that do not belong to them, but when they catch errors they can fix them on the spot without bother anyone else
- strictly avoid assigning permissions to individuals, as that quickly becomes a maintenance pain; use groups instead
- promote the usage of page discussions so the page author learns how to improve his writing with respect to the actual readers
- if someone breaks a rule, contact him/her and learn why that happened; update rules if the arguments are valid.
As I said, some discipline is required, but in order to make the wiki work, you have to really make maintenance a collective, shared task. It surely takes some time, but I think it’s really worth the effort.
Any other tip or suggestion?
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