Tip7: Trust me. Don’t excessively manage it.

July 21st, 2010

A wiki doesn’t have complex approval mechanisms for a reason. Trust people to write quality content and they will.
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Tip6: Don’t rush it.

July 14th, 2010

People will need time to get used to the wiki, and once they do it will grow significantly.

There is no hard rule here. Some teams can get up to speed in a matter of weeks, other organizations will take months to grow into the habit of a successful wiki. I have seen often that people new to the wiki start overly enthusiastic and add tremendous amount of content in the wiki. Only to find themselves out of breath a few weeks later.

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Tip5: Go to the source. Put some content exclusively on the wiki so people get used to it as the source of information.

July 7th, 2010

Your way to make the wiki be the true source of content is to make it indispensable.

Part of the cunning plan

We've written about this before. In most business situations, there is a lot of collective knowledge that cannot be remembered by most people. So all these typical topics are good candidates to be put in the wiki. We give a list of possible 'unique reference opportunities' below:

Reference information on people

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Tip4: Wikipedia does not make a wiki.

June 27th, 2010

Don’t mistake your wiki for Wikipedia. Yours doesn’t have to be anonymous and open to the public. Read more

What the experts say on wysiwyg editors in Wikis

June 18th, 2010

The great site wikipatterns has a full page dedicated to the benefits, problems and tips for a wysiwyg editor. We feel this page is written more for makers of wiki software than for the people wanting to introduce a wiki in their organization. Yet there is some interesting stuff in there we can pick up.

Wysiwyg Benefits

The site lists following benefits:

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Tip3: Populate it and they’ll come.

June 1st, 2010

Put content on the wiki; direct people to it using email.

This tip seems a bit counter-intuitive. I mean, that sentence originates from the "Build it and they will come", which has become somewhat of a sarcastic statement. And that also the way the authors meant it. You need great content, that's for sure, but you need to open people's eye to where that content is. Read more

Tip2: Throw out the rule book!

April 28th, 2010

Don’t start with a lot of structure and rules. Make a wiki available, then see how people use it, and grow accordingly. Follow the lead of the people using it – that’s at the heart of how social software works!

This tip goes to the heart of what the web2.0 movement is all about. Everybody is contributing. In this way, the result is better than what you would ever get when you tried to enforce it to your team or department. Read more

Tip1: Grassroots approach

April 7th, 2010

Tip 1 in the article "Top 10 Organizational Wiki Tips (and how to use them)" on http://www.ikiw.org/2008/01/21/top-10-organizational-wiki-tips-and-how-to-use-them/ says "Grassroots is best. Start from the bottom-up so people build a sense of ownership of their wiki contributions." Read more

You can't be fired if you choose for these 10 wiki introduction rules

March 31st, 2010

The article "Top 10 Organizational Wiki Tips (and how to use them)" is already some time out there, but it has become somewhat of a special guidance to us.(See http://www.ikiw.org for more fine content on wikis)Read more

I am hurt

March 23rd, 2010

What am I to do? Everybody seems to hate my good old friend MSWord. I saved a twitter search on MSWord in my tweetdeck account, so I am confronted with it daily. About 95% of all tweets are about how people hate it. Especially the autocorrect seems to upset users. What I can't understand is why people act so irrational about the attempts Word makes in correcting what it finds. Read more