Wikis Need Some Love (and best practices)

Since June of 2006 I’ve been moderating wikis as a part-time job for a company in Seattle. And then soon after at Blackbaud, we’ve explored and researched the use of a wiki as a help file. Since then, I’ve been focusing my efforts on creating an internal documentation wiki as a team development tool. Through my experiences, I’ve learned a few things about how to encourage best practices in wiki use.

1. Before you implement a wiki, spend time populating it with common topics and a basic set of information. Don’t just hand out a blank one to your team and expect them to figure out what to do with it. By establishing content already in the wiki, people are more comfortable following an example.
2. Before and during implementation, you need to spend time on the organization. Pages will be added, moved, and deleted. You need to keep the pages organized so that users don’t freak out when they see a mess of pages. People like boundaries, rules, organization – it provides a comfortable structure for them to contribute towards.
3. People need prompts and templates. Thinking about style and creating easy to use templates always encourages people to contribute more. But don’t expect them to use these things perfectly, clean up will need to be done. And prompts are always good to help guide people towards the behavior you want them to exhibit.
4. Be an active member yourself. People like strong leadership in a wiki especially where so few will become active participants.
5. Don’t underestimate providing multiple modes of navigation. Search, most recently updated pages tool, traditional table of contents hierarchy, and tag clouds are just some examples. I’ve also had a lot of success changing up links on the main page to continually bring new content and pages to users’ attention.
6. Peer to Peer messaging works. People can easily forget what they were doing two minutes ago so I don’t expect them to think of the wiki all the time. Instead, it’s extremely helpful to send P2P messages to users with a combination of prompts and links.
7. Users really like recognition, polls, and comments. If you can include these three things, you’ll be doing well. Recognition for contributions may be only a pat on the back but it means a lot to community members. Polls are great for opinions and everyone has one. And comments, well that’s a way for community members to connect, ask questions, and in general feel safe from the pressure of actually editing a page. Chances are if you can get them commenting, you’ll eventually get them editing.
8. WYSIWYG is a given. But going above that, see if you can provide a way to make adding pictures, video, widgets, and more easier. This will not only make the wiki more dynamic but people aren’t always lovers of long pages of static text.
9. If pages are getting longer and scrolling gives you hand cramps, do your wiki users a favor and break up the content into sub-pages. You can then use the main page as a starting point and create links. Wikis aren’t meant to be books or just content storage. It’s interactive, ever evolving, and (shockingly) fun!
10. Don’t underestimate the importance of a good moderator/editor. Life in wiki land can easily get out of control if you don’t have someone watching, loving, and caring for your wiki. Or, it can get all dusty and desert like if no one provides some attention to growth whether it’s encouraging participation, providing opportunities to contribute, or keeping pages clean and organized. It will also help if this moderator/editor is an expert in the wiki topics because then they can verify the content as they supervise it. As we all know, wikis can bring the best out of our collective knowledge or the worst and when it comes to work wikis, we all want the best.
    

Those are just my top ten tips for wiki use but I’ll continue to post on wikis if anything new develops, if you seem excited about wikis, or if I learn something geeky cool that I just have to share with y’all.

And please, if you have questions about my experiences or if you have a problem and want to troubleshoot, just send me an email or add a comment below. I definitely would love to share my passion for wikis with others. I don’t know why it is, but something about community created content gets me all tingly inside.