Wiki Blog

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.

Email is your friend

We've said on many occasions that whatever get's emailed to more than one person, is a candidate to be put in the wiki. So why use mail as your friend? The big difference of course between mail and wiki pages is the push and the pull mechanism. An email is really pushed in the person's inbox whereas the wiki page needs to be navigated to. Because people like short and clear emails, concentrate the gist of what you want the recipient to do with it (understand, take action, remember,..) in the email body, but the background is pointed to by an wiki url.

Topics you can offload from an email to your wiki are: attachments, process descriptions, specifications, and so on. Things you would need to remember or that you want the team to remember.

Your cunning plan

You could of course make the wiki so content rich and so well structured that people can simply not ignore it. Once all the collective team knowledge is in a wiki and that wiki is well structured and easy search-able, you will find that no decision can be taken without consulting some of its pages. The cunning plan is to make the wiki the sole place where up to date information can be found. Archive folders that contain useless and outdated stuff, publish updates of once used files and network locations on wiki pages only. Soon you will see no one can ignore the wiki.

The baseball field in the picture above comes from "Field of Dreams", a 1989 American drama sports film. In this film, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) is a novice farmer who lives in rural Iowa with his wife, Annie (Amy Madigan), and their young daughter Karin (Gaby Hoffmann). While walking through his cornfield, Ray hears a voice whisper, "If you build it, he will come" (often misquoted as "If you build it, they will come"), and sees a vision of a baseball field.