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.
A wiki is not a publishing engine
In a previous live, we have worked for some years in the publishing industry. That industry has its particular processes for content creation, indexing, storage, retrieval, review and finally publication build. Quite easy to understand when you know that the final product need to be pushed out to professional printers that, after some final processing, print it in high quantities. The professional publishing industry now publishes much of its content online. The result is that its cycle time can be drastically reduced. Yet most of the processes still apply.
Approaching a wiki with a publishing background is a definite no-no. The wiki built in mechanics concentrate on a superfast edit/publish cycle. One key feature in this is the knowledge that all changes are visible, all author actions are exposed and, if desired, all mistakes can easily be reversed. This is what is called a game changer. In other entries in this blog, we have made the case that the wiki contains many of the publishing functionality in one neat, easy to manage and understand package. Content creation, linking, indexing, versioning, review and publishing are not only all there, but they also are contained in one neat package.
So yes, the wiki content is also 'content', pushing the 'save' button can be considered as publishing and the more advanced wikis even add auto indexing, keyword management and some sort of 'table of content' creation. One big difference is that the wiki is a two way process. The reader can adapt, augment, correct, complete the content that is proposed.
So how to 'manage' a wiki?
Pushing content out there and get the wiki 'the' reference source is the task you want to accomplish. Put all of your organization's knowledge on a place where you know you can find it if nobody can be reached. So focus on getting the critical mass in there and get your team into the habit of updating and maintaining the wiki regularly.
But after some time, 6 to 12 months in most cases, you will see that the self organizing capabilities of a wiki may need some gentle push or discrete clean up and restructuring. We have called it 'Spring cleaning' before suggesting that its frequency will be rather low. Typical actions you may take are listed below:
- Put the wiki cleaning and restructuring as a separate topic on the team quarterly meeting agenda.
- Use new projects or special events as the reason to add new content to the wiki and archive old pages
- Suggest searching wikis for specific problem situations that the team encounters. If your team finds it, see if it is still up to date. If not found, grab the opportunity to add a new wiki section.
- Don't hesitate to archive complete subsections of the your wiki. Add a section called 'old' or 'obsolete version' and move stuff over there. It will not be lost and you have made room for new and fresh content.
Know it will never be perfect, never finished
This is probably more a problem for some people than for others. Some people take hours or days before they are happy with the result of their content creation. Just because everyone can see what they wrote, they get stuck in polishing and re-polishing the content. They much rather not publish anything. One trick that can help is to just open the relevant pages during some meeting or some face to face talk, and just start editing. Taking notes on the fly. After the meeting you forward url's to the pages to the relevant people asking them to complete it.
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