Wiki Patterns

grow your wiki

Guided Approach

Grassroots is best

Any grassroots, or bottom-up, strategy is the best place to start since the success of a wiki depends on building active, sustainable participation and this only happens when people see that the software is simple enough to immediately be useful, and meets their needs without requiring them to spend lots of extra time. A good first step is to identify a group or department who would likely benefit the most from using a wiki, and whose people are open to trying new tools. If you're looking to expand wiki use in another group, look for the thought leader in the group - someone who is very forward thinking, respected by peers, and willing to Champion a new idea and get others around them involved. If you're the thought leader, congratulations! Encouraging others to use a wiki can be as easy as the wiki itself if you encourage the right patterns of behavior and content creation.

The first edit

A good strategy for a person's first contact with a wiki is an Invitation to create a profile, like My Personal Info. For one thing, it's useful to have standard information about people, like phone numbers, email addresses, IM screen names, and web site URLs in an easy to access and easy to update place. It's the difficulty of updating that hinders most other types of content management and web site creation tools, but this isn't the case with wiki so it's a much more attractive option. Personal pages also give people a place to write about themselves and the ease of doing this can make the first experience using a wiki enjoyable. Building pages is also good for building community since people can help each other with questions or problems. Even just informally discussing things like what to include on the pages gets people talking about a common thread, and it doesn't have the same formality as working on a project.

Building group collaboration

Once people are comfortable using the wiki, you can help them explore how to apply it to their work. Discuss projects, tasks, knowledge for critical processes, etc. that could make use of the wiki. Find out what's most important for the group to do their jobs well, and if possible where they feel information flow, collaboration, etc. is weak. This gives you specific instances to demonstrate how the wiki can meet their most important needs.
For example, a department might start by putting meeting agendas on the wiki before each staff meeting. Anyone in the department can add a new item, add additional information about an existing item, or delete something that's no longer relevant to the meeting. During the meeting, people can take notes as items are discussed, effectively taking meeting minutes right on the wiki. From here, items that turn into projects or initiatives can be given their own space on the wiki for project management and collaboration, and the wiki becomes a Magnet for all manner of collaborative work. In a corporate marketing department, this space might be used for drafting whitepapers, product marketing materials, and press releases. In a software engineering group, the space might be used to organize meetings, collaboratively write documentation, and allow developers working in several locations to keep track of work on all parts of the project. In a grant making foundation, the wiki might be used to keep track of grant proposals, and give reviewers a space to make comments as they review the proposals.

scaffold - give people pages with template and they fill in sections. also good to include example fill out so people can see what types of information to include, exclude, etc.
share files
cut down on email
in transition from email to wiki collaboration, send email but link to wiki page. After a while, you wouldn't even have to send email anymore - people will just go directly to the wiki. This ties into the notion of Viral adoption - putting content on a wiki then emailing a link to it increases the value of the wiki because of the added content, but also because more people are looking at it for content even if they don't edit it when they first visit. Simply seeing content there, and seeing other collaborating on it will eventually convince more and more people to invest their time in collaborating on the wiki.
attach email download open - cut down on inefficient use of time between instances of creativity/collaboration/knowledge construction.

Spreading adoption

Once the first group's use has progressed to this level, you now have the benefit of evangelists who will help you spread the word to more groups and departments. More people using it means they can each encourage their direct contacts and collaborators to join, thus laying the groundwork for exponential growth. This Viral growth increases the value of the wiki to each user, because the number of people with which one can collaborate increases.

Support emergent behavior over existing processes

As use of the wiki grows in your organization, it's important to make sure people feel comfortable trying new, unexpected ways of using it. The exercise of introducing a wiki and shifting core activities of an organization to it offers an opportunity to examine existing processes, workflows, and ways of organizing information. Forcing people to rigidly apply existing processes to the wiki is likely to make it unsuccessful, as these ways of working may run counter to peoples' discovery of more efficient methods. Especially when people are first getting used to the wiki, it's important that they do it in a way that helps them see how it works, even if that means the first information they put on the wiki is something seemingly trivial like directions for shipping a package.

People should be encouraged to find the role that best suits them, since this is an important factor in how well they engage with the wiki. One person might like to offer more substantive changes to content, while another might be more comfortable fixing typos, finding citations for quotes, fixing broken links, and adding links where appropriate. The former is often referred to as a WikiGardener while the latter is commonly called a WikiGnome. People who volunteer to be involved with the wiki should be especially supported since they likely have the curiosity and open minded approach that will make them influential in building a successful collaborative community. Leaders on the wiki don't necessarily have to be the people with official titles offline. For example, if one member of a team shows the most initiative and enthusiasm about the wiki, the manager of that group might designate that person the point person for wiki for that team. The point person might then be responsible for recurring activities like posting the first version of the staff meeting agenda, and training other team members on the wiki. The manager can then support the point person's work, and

What can hinder wiki adoption?

• Wiki Troll (opposite of Wiki Gnome/Gardener)
• creating empty pages - people won't know where to start so at least give them a basic structure, a more directed scaffold, or just a few lines of info on the page's purpose and what content should be added to it (even if that content is to be generated over time and not immediately available).
• doing it all yourself - if one person seems to control all the pages, and is constantly starting all the new pages or making big changes to pages others have started, people will be discouraged. It's important that people have a sense of ownership that balances with the community participation on a wiki, so that they feel they've accomplished something and are responsible for maintaining its success.
• don't organize too much - remember a wiki should start out with the least amount of structure necessary and structure should only be added over time, when needed. If one person dictates the structure too much, and moves or rearranges pages others have just created, people will lose interest in the wiki because they feel they don't have much to contribute or can't do it in a way that satisfies them.

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