Wednesday, December 24, 2008  

For those customers using EditMe as a wiki, this post highlights an indispensable resource for making your wiki a success. EditMe cancellations are carefully tracked, and the #1 reason customers give for giving up on their site is lack of adoption. Whether your wiki is intended for a small internal audience at work or hopes to gather the intelligence of the masses around a particular topic, getting people to come, read and contribute is always a challenge.

Thankfully, many have come before you and paved the road for making a wiki work. The best of these lessons have been distilled in, what else, a wiki. WikiPatterns.com outlines four categories of wiki usage that help or hinder success:

• People Patterns - these are helpful roles that wiki visitors/editors play in the development and life of the wiki.
• People Anti-Patterns - these are destructive roles that wiki visitors/editors play.
• Adoption Patterns - Usage patterns that promote adoption.
• Adoption Anti-Patterns - Usage patterns that corrupt and degrade adoption.

Each pattern is made up of a simple description with examples and commentary. Spending an hour or two reading through these patterns will make you a veritable wiki adoption expert.

Here are a few patterns that I've found to be particularly relevant:

• Magnet - Move some frequently updated information to the wiki that people are used to looking for elsewhere. This could be a lunch menu, weekly sales figures or the company holiday schedule. Even if everyone doesn't edit this information, it will get people used to going to the wiki, which is step #1. This is closely related to Seed It With Content.
• One Hammer - This anti-pattern asks you to reconsider moving everything to the wiki. While wikis are great for lots of different uses, not everything belongs there. Loading the site down with things it's not good at will give naysayers good reason to scrap the project. 
• Permission Granted - This pattern stresses a key wiki concept: the importance of open permissions. People new to wikis generally lean towards more restrictive permissions than is necessary. Some simple tools to monitor changes and tasking someone to monitor those changes to selectively roll-back bad edits makes everyone feel more empowered. You'll be surprised how little rolling back will be required!