Using a wiki effectivly requires some changes in the day to day behaviours of knowledge workers.
Over time, wiki users will find themselves working in ways that promote more efficient use of their knowledge and the information they are manipulating, but when users first start to use a wiki, there are just three key behaviours that need to be adopted to gain significant benefits. Each of these behaviours, while simple itself, will lead to more complex behaviours over time, especially when combined together.
Behaviour one
 | If you have something to write, write it in the wiki |
This is the fundamental change in behaviour that delivers the majority of benefits that stem from using a wiki. It may seem quite obvious that if you are starting to use a wiki, you should do this, but most people have deeply established patterns that they use when writing things down and it takes time and persistence to change them.
Users need to be careful not to take this behaviour too far and the behaviour should be modified to be contain the 'if practical' limitation. It is not quite as catchy, but the behaviour could be rephrased as 'If you have something to write, write it in the wiki if it is practical to do so'. Organisations often have dedicated software tools that do a special job, such as tracking safety issues, managing customer databases and business processes etc. These dedicated tools may be the best tools for the job, or they may be mandated for compulsory usage. However, there is still an opportunity to use the wiki in these cases. Many tools are limited in their use and restrict users to a certain types of information or certain ways of working, so a wiki can be used in a support and enhancement role. The wiki may hold general information, such as user manuals and tutorials about the tool itself. The wiki may also be used to document procedures on how the tool is used. In some cases, it may be useful to create a page in the wiki for specific entries in the tool. For instance, if the tool was a safety hazard tracking tool, it may be possible to create a wiki page for each a safety hazard which is cross linked with the relevant entry in the tool itself.
Personal benefits
- Keeping your work in the wiki means that you can get to it from anywhere.
- It is safe and backed up and you can easily communicate it to other people.
- You can also use hyperlinks to connect your work.
- Become a thought leader by being the first to add information to the wiki.
- Other people can improve your work by editing or commenting.
Team benefits
- Your team members can reference your work using hyperlinks.
- Your team can reuse your work.
- The team can quickly find and access your skills by seeing what content you have added to the wiki.
Corporate benefits
- Intellectual property is more visible
- Usage and user statistics can be used to create metrics for a range of uses
Over time, this simple behaviour will change the way people treat the knowledge that they create and it will give them more power over how it is used, by themselves or others. Once this behaviour becomes second nature, more detailed behaviours will emerge that use more advanced features of the wiki. An early modification to this behaviour is to include a search first, so that users search for similar knowledge before they start adding their own. If users do find something similar, they can choose to just edit the existing pages by adding their contribution, or it may be appropriate to just add some links from the new work to the work found in the search. Users may also chose to make contact with the people who's work was found in the search and take the opportunity to discuss the tacit knowledge issues that may surround the and give context to the explicit knowledge that is actually written down.
Once a user has used the wiki to record something, the wiki will give them new options for further manipulating the knowledge. A great deal of different options do exist, and a short list may include things like:
- Change the permissions of the new page to control access to it.
- Ensure that page notifications are selected so changes to the page can be monitored.
- Email a link to the page to people who might be interested.
- Create links to the new page from other pages.
- Monitor statistics for the page to see how much interest there is in it.
- Put labels on the page to help categorize it.
- Start a comment thread by asking leading questions in the comment section
Behaviour two
| If you need to send an email, send a link to a wiki page. |
This behaviour stems naturally from the first behaviour. Once a wiki page is created, it is easy to email a link to it. This behaviour is an alternative to sending emails about a topic where the text all resides in the email itself.
People who do not adopt this behaviour are doomed experience the common problems with email. Email storms are created where it is sometimes difficult to determine exactly what is going on; the outcome is often lost in distributed email inboxes; and people can be left out of the conversation.
Personal benefits
- Wiki pages are permanent, maintained records that won't disappear like email.
- Communicating using a wiki page also gives you a lot more options, such as the ability to edit it after you send it and allowing others to edit the content
Team benefits
- The team can build up a knowledge base simply by putting email conversations into the wiki.
- Team knowledge can be added and managed with almost no extra work.
- Because wiki pages are more open than emails, information can be communicated more effectively.
Corporate benefits
Behaviour three
| Check the recent changes daily |
Personal benefits
- Check what you did yesterday and pickup on any threads that you were working on. Don't drop the ball because you forgot what you were working on last week or before the holidays.
Team benefits
- Team members can see what each other are working on and lend a hand if it is appropriate.
- People can stay in touch with peripheral issues by watching edits to related pages.
Corporate benefits
- By watching recent changes, individuals can keep track of activities beyond their own team.
- Higher levels of management can see what multiple teams are up to.
Advanced Behaviours
Over time, as users become more adept at using the wiki, then will tend to modify the wiki in more complex ways to improve the content. Some advanced behaviours include:
Refactoring
Refactoring, which is also sometimes refered to as 'wiki gardening', is the process of reorganising, reordering, reclassifying, relocating, consolidationg and differentiating a wiki pages. In general, refactoring will increase the quality of a page and some of the specific thinks that could be done include:
- ensuring that the page has a consistent message
- trimming down the page if it is longer than necessary
- adding links to other related pages
- removing content that is duplicated in other pages
- fixing the title to ensure it reflects the content
- general structural changes, such as organising bullet points or making paragraphs the right size
- removing redundant comments
- merging important comments into the text of the page
Indexing
Indexing is the process of creating special pages that contain series of links to related topics. Some indexes may be general and universal, such as a list of departments and they may only change infrequently, such as when the organisation is restructured. Other index pages may be medium term, such as a list of project deliverables and other index pages may be short lived and relate to a specific issue.
TODO - Discuss the issues associated with indexing in more depth
Search first
As mentioned in 'behaviour one' above, searching for content related to the content you are about to add is a very powerful behaviour. To many people, this is an obvious thing to do, and it should be part of normal knowledge working discipline, but in a wiki environment there is an added dimensions. Firstly, free linking, or the ability to quickly and easily link to content, means that the results of a search not only tell you what content exists, but they also give a series of potential references that will add value to the new content. Another advantage of searching is a wiki environment is the social aspect. The related pages that are picked up in the peremptory search show not just what related content is available, but who was involved in creating and editing that content.
Take in the context
When reading content in a wiki, it is important to consider it within the context of the other information on the page. Any judgment of the quality and value of the information in a page should be made after checking a number of key points such as:
- Who wrote the content?
- When was it last updated?
- How often has the content been changed, and by who?
- How many incoming links are there?
- What are the usage statistics?
