Wiki Patterns
grow your wiki
EditEngagementLadder
Synopsis
Establishing where your users are on a ladder of engagement will help you measure the health of your wiki community, and will help identify ways you can encourage contributors to increase their level of participation.
Usage
- An engagement ladder highlights the progression from inactive, to passive, to active, to facilitative and eventually to visionary participation in knowledge exchange in your wiki.
- Typically, people transition from one rung to an adjacent rung, or may skip a rung.
- Note that the goal isn't always to progress, and it's not strictly a linear progression.
- Activities aimed and encouraging behaviour several rungs higher than a participant is comfortable with may be less fruitful than gearing your encouragement and evangilization activities to match the level of engagement.
- A healthy wiki will have members from most ladder rungs, and people play different parts at different times.
- One key to remember is that there is no technical restriction on someone playing any role, it just depends on their experience and level of engagement and to some degree their personality.
- Simply showing the ladder itself can help recognize high-performers and contributors.
Example
A Forrester^1^ study showed a progression as follows:
- Inactives -> Spectators -> Joiners -> Collectors -> Critics -> Creators
Examples of these activities might be - Non-participants -> wikipedia reader -> podcast consumer -> private forum or social network participant -> Social bookmarking participant or wikipedia category maintainer or rss feed builder -> blog or wiki commenter -> wikipedia author, facebook page customizer, blog author
At the top of this ladder, you may also find: - ... Creators -> Maintainer -> Ambassadors -> Builders -> Strategists -> Organizers -> Architects -> Visionaries -> Alchemists (collectively, wikiGardeners
You might propose an anti-ladder that shows increasing levels of distrust or disgust for collaborative environments. While they may be 'active' in the wiki, these activites are 'less than active' in promoting community and productivity. - vandal <- Gate <- wikiTroll <- wikiPhobia <- Bully <- contributorForHire <- wikiNoob <- Leech <- inactives
Related Patterns
- propose we map most or all 'people' patterns to this ladder
- wikiGnome
- wikiGardener
- wikiTroll
References
- 1 - Forrester 2008 (would someone please check fair use and copyright status for this reference).
Adoption Patterns
Adoption Anti-Patterns
Wikipatterns.com is sponsored by Atlassian Software, creators of JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo and Crowd
Designed by Headshift Ltd
One thing to note, that although the graphic used by Forrester is a ladder, Forrester's social technographics only describe types of behavior found in certain demographics, and as such you may notice that the particiaption percentages for all the categories typically add up to more than 100%. The more common usage is to find the ways your demographic is participating and then deploying tools or engaging with them in manners that they are accustomed to. Member rewards in a given community should likely not be strictly hierarchical as there is overlap.