Wiki Myths
Wiki Myths, Wiki Reality
by Dorthe R. Jespersen
09-Jan-2009 --
Although wikis have gained substantially in popularity since they first appeared some ten years ago, many enterprises still begin their wiki projects with unrealistic expectations. While researching the impact of wikis during recent work on the Enterprise Social Software Report and Wiki in the Enterprise, we heard of frequent struggles getting wiki projects off the ground.
In particular, we repeatedly encountered the same three myths from over-exuberant project leaders.
- That the launch of a wiki will automagically motivate everyone in the organization to contribute information
- That employees will intuitively know how to contribute
- That a wiki will make it easier to keep track of relevant information.
Reality looks a bit different. Wikis can indeed deliver powerful value, but you want to approach them with the same critical eye that you would any other information technology.
Myth #1: A wiki will heighten motivation and spark contributions
One of the oldest myths in the book: that technology alone will change employee behavior.
Many enterprises expect that a wiki in itself will motivate employees to contribute new content and comment on each other's work. Just take a look at Wikipedia, where the combined efforts of volunteers have resulted in over 7 million articles. When information workers can decide for themselves what to write and how to write it, the argument goes, that will surely result in more publishing.
However, many organizational wikis have endured only a very short life, with empty pages and almost no activity. Empty wiki syndrome typically results when a wiki gets implemented without a clear purpose -- without an idea of who it should serve and why -- or suffers from being too general by wanting to do everything.
Another typical hurdle is culture. Freedom for all to contribute can be an unwelcome change to those with an organizational culture not geared towards openness and dialogue. Adding to the problem is the frequent concern of content quality -- that some important information in the wiki may be incorrect. An organizational belief that information should be authorized, well documented, and "finished" in order to get published clashes with the wiki way of sharing work-in-progress. When management is unwilling to engage in dialogue and workers are nervous about exposing their unfinished work, a wiki will rarely be successful.
Like all information systems, wikis must help information workers in their daily work and not be positioned as an archive into which information gets pushed uncritically. Most successful wiki projects support a defined purpose for a defined group of people. In other words, the goal is not to launch a wiki -- it is to collaborate around information.
In addition to getting the basic premise right, there are a number of other things you can do to encourage more contributions. First of all don't launch an empty wiki. Instead, give your colleagues something to react to and build off, e.g., samples of content and a basic information architecture. Try to integrate the wiki with other enterprise tools, for example by linking to wiki content from the intranet, thus raising its visibility. Remember that the wiki won't grow if there are no incentives to contribute -- both in the form of cultural values and in the form of resources to maintain the wiki.
I'll add that highly successful wiki projects are frequently driven by IT-savvy employees. They have an understanding for the technology, as well as prior experience with wikis, perhaps from editing pages on Wikipedia. You may face challenges introducing the wiki to non-technical users, since a wiki requires a new, unfamiliar way of working, and system usability usually leaves much to be desired. This brings us to Myth #2...
Myth #2: Employees will know how to contribute
Many organizations expect workers to start using the wiki immediately. The concept is quite simple so it must be equally simple to get started?
However, a wiki requires adjusting to a new way of working with content and structure. Those familiar with wikis often don't understand that casual users do not find it obvious and logical at all to create new content.
For example, in a wiki, links come before content; if you want to create a new page, you first have to consider which page it should be linked from. This may sound like a small detail but it is a new perspective for editors -- and demands practice. One strength of the wiki is precisely its bottom-up, link-based nature, but to gain full value here, this thinking must be introduced from the beginning. You will likely want to introduce guidelines on how to link extensively -- but consistently -- in order to avoid page redundancies and other wiki-killers.
Moreover, most wiki interfaces are not as user friendly as advertised. Most wikis employ a special wiki mark-up (e.g., *text* for bold or _text_ for italics), instead of rich text editing, which has become standard in other web publishing systems. Moreover, the mark-up will be different from one wiki to another. Wiki mark-up is most likely to appeal to a niche technical population inside your enterprise. Heretofore unforeseen technical training therefore becomes a requirement in many projects.
But even experienced wiki authors may need training in your enterprise environment. They may know the basic features, but will never discover useful functionality, such as e-mail-notifications of recent changes, watch lists, rolling back versions, or working offline. (Enterprise Social Software Report readers know that not all wiki tools support those features.)
Myth #3: Wikis will always surface the information you need
Many promoters believe that the flexibility of a wiki ensures updated, relevant content that is easy to find. Since employees can regularly make changes to both content and information architecture themselves, surely it won't become outdated?
Actually, enterprises with heavy wiki usage soon find that content volumes can grow faster than the organization can keep up -- with structure dissolving into chaos, and diminishing value as mountains of information make individual items all that harder to find. When each new page needs a unique name, how do you find a meaningful name while ensuring some sort of consistency? And when it becomes faster to create a new page than to find out if a similar page already exists, how do you avoid an outright information explosion?
To make matters worse, search functionality in most wikis is weak. Results are often presented by last-edited date, perhaps helpful if you want to find something new, but less helpful with thousands of search results.
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If you don't create guidelines and processes for managing information, a wiki will lead to an exponential information growth far beyond the management capacity of staff. The potential gap between information and capacity is a risk to the enterprise since it means reduced findability and the potential expansion of redundant information.
Ensuring a useful wiki requires a dedicated effort. You'll want to appoint one or more wiki managers or "stewards," who perform regular searches and quality checking of content added by different contributors.
Besides monitoring wiki usage, they should also provide help in best practices, like how to build and maintain structure, and use links extensively. In addition, a simple set of guidelines for how to maintain content, links, and structure may go a long way in keeping the wiki useful. While a wiki stresses flexibility by not enforcing templates, developing some agreed-upon guidelines for page templates can nonetheless help contributors work more effectively. For example, a table of contents on the top of every page helps readers scan long sections better.
Wiki Reality
A wiki offers a simple and flexible approach to creating and sharing information. Despite such simplicity and flexibility, a wiki project will not necessarily prove successful. Remember that flexibility also represents one of your largest challenges: You may gain a quick "win" for enabling collaborative content creation -- but this corpus could just as easily grow beyond your capacity for handling it.
So, while wikis are untraditional, the best-known, traditional technology myths can doom your wiki project. Avoid uncomfortable surprises by aligning expectations before launching a wiki. Make sure management understands the amount of resources -- especially human resources -- necessary to maintain a successful wiki. In the end, your organizational culture will prove the most important factor. A leadership that encourages open communication and valuing work-in-progress can provide a solid foundation for any wiki project.