Would you need a wiki maintainer?
February 28th, 2011
According to the wonderful http://www.wikipatterns.com site, a maintainer is a person assigned or self-assigned to a page, space or section of a wiki who accountably takes responsibility for the quality of some of the content. The role may include that of a:
- secretary, collecting information from comments and meetings into the wiki
- refactorer, collapsing redundancy and inserting organization into a wiki
- solicitor, encouraging input from community members
- architect, categorizing pages, creating 'project' and 'overview' pages, assigning meanings to labels
While everyone will agree that this is indeed a vary valid wiki pattern, to actually get it off the ground may be an whole different matter. Let's focus on what we saw typically happen in organizations.
Wikis should be self-maintained
For some reason people seem to think that any sort of wiki organization is a bad thing. Maybe it is the myriad of open source solutions that exist for wikis, may be it is their inherently open editing nature, maybe it is just a sign of the times, but every time we try to get someone in the organization responsible for setting up and maintaining a subsection of the wiki, we get a big oh-oh. Like, how can you seriously consider organizing something as beautiful and organic as a wiki? The answer is simple.
Assigning a responsible owner for a section or a subsection of your wiki will help you move things forward. There are just some things that need to get done and you cannot rely at all times that 'someone will fix it'. The bad news is everyone will think everyone else will fix it. We've often advocated to use the wiki for meeting preparation, agenda setup and meeting minutes review and approval.
In our previous blog post on "50 tips to get your wiki up and running" we have shown following tip: The bad news is that these things don't come naturally. Even worse, when you leave things to organize themselves, you can be pretty sure all hell will break loose in no time. A simple set of rules for our meetings example:Acknowledge wiki (sub) section ownership
- All team meetings are in the wiki.
- The wiki organizer makes sure that the minutes are available max 24 hours after the meeting.
These can make sure things move forward.
Other examples of wiki pages that merit a responsible:
- Contact list.
- Requirements and specifications.
- Customer info.
- Knowledge base.
- Course schedules...
- ...
In fact most of the 'structured' wiki page content can be attributed a responsible.