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.
It never stops to amaze me how wikipedia has become the synonym of 'the wiki'. Do a search on twitter for wiki. Almost half of the people are simply assuming that wikipedia is 'the wiki'. Although technically speaking wikipedia is a wiki, the business context is slightly different. There the term 'the wiki' should at least get most people understand that you actually mean the team's of company's wiki and not the world's most wonderful illustration of its collective knowledge. As a side note, a anecdotal illustration of why wikipedia is different, is the fact their best times (financially speaking) is when they are down. Probably this is not something you can say of most of your systems and applications. This is because wikipedia's 'site is down' page has an appeal to send them some money.
There is more than one wiki software
Mediawiki is the software used to power wikipedia. Although it is one of the very robust and obviously very scalable wikis out there, spend some time to see if it would fit in your organization. One key factor you will hear us mentioning over and over again is the WYSIWYG capability, or rather the lack of it. To get a good comparison on the features that interest you, go to wikimatrix.
Try to imitate wikipedia, but not too much
Wikipedia's best lesson is that great content will attract many visitors. Another powerful lesson is that many people just want to put in the effort to share content and to help people out. They clearly are motivated by other factors than money or paychecks. Make sure to award an interesting wiki contribution with the appropriate appreciation. That alone will motivate the author and others to continue adding value to it.
Think twice about what you open to who
Wikipedia is all about sharing as much as possible to everyone. Don't simply apply this to your wiki. There are things that are better kept inside your company or even your team. The same is true for write access. You need at least the basic identification of who can update what parts of the wiki. When someone tells you to imitate the wikipedia's processes as closely as possible "because that's how it should be", run away.
WordonWiki's privilege structure in its current settings is rather simplistic: it divides users up into people having no access, those that have read access, those with write access and admins. Future versions will elaborate on this to make priviledge settings page or folder dependent. This is quite high on our backlog list as it is asked by many people.
Even wikipedia has a strong editorial staff and process in place. Many of the pages are true battlegrounds for people coming from different opinions, religions and beliefs. Yet, almost all of the controversial pages, have truly great content and represent a balanced view about the topic.
To conclude...
Wikipedia is the best and worst example for your in-house wiki:
The best because
- Great content is provided because generally people want to share.
- Its software scales to be one of the most visited sites in the world.
- Its brand name is so strong that it has become the synonym of 'the wiki'.
The worst because
- The whole world is your team. You'll be lucky if you will have a core team of 3 regular contributors.
- Wikipedia is kept up to date up to the minute. Events just happened are available almost instantly, much faster than newspapers or even radio/TV. In your team, you will need to relentlessly ask the team: 'has the wiki been updated yet?'.
- Wikipedia's underlying software is not really supporting easy and fast data entry. Although most of your users will never have attempted to update a wikipedia article, if they have come across other mediawiki implementations, the arcane interface may frighten them. Luckily, more modern tools exist that make WYSIWYG possible.