A common question that is asked soon after a new wiki installation is put into production is 'How can I promote usage of this wiki?'. A wikis value to an organisation is directly proportional to the number of users who actively participate in it, so it is certainly an improtant question.
Technology Issues
Many people who will be expected to use the wiki will not be 'technical' people. They may be administrative staff, sales staff or any sort of knowledge worker and will have limited experience and interest in even the work 'wiki', let alone the technology behind it.
Anyone who can use a word processor can use a wiki, so of the wiki is introduced in the right way, the technology of a wiki site will not be an impediment to using it. A study of 4th grade students showed that primary school children have little difficulty understanding a wiki site, but the one concept that they had problems with was the concept of creating page links. Understanding page linking is a fundamental part of being able to contribute to a wiki and care must be taken in explaining and teaching it to new 'non-technical' users.
Many users will adopt the technology with little trouble, but care must be taken to set up a learning program that focuses on hands on learning and mentoring techniques to help those who are slower to pick up new technologies.
Lead by Example
Leaders in the organisation should start using the wiki as their primary method of communications. The news feature of the wiki is a good way to do this. Initially, emails can be sent to users telling them about the wiki, but eventually these emails will cease and people will be expected to subscribe to pages for notifications, or check the wiki regularly for updates.
Leaders need to refer to the wiki regularly and start to use it to get things done as well as disseminate information.
Organic Growth
Organic, or viral growth is a term that is often used to describe the way wiki sites spread within an organisation. The use of a wiki site can spread informally, from one knowledge worker to the next, without any encouragement, or even knowledge of higher levels of management.
While this is a valid and generally successful way to introduce a wiki into an organisation, it suffers from a few problems.
- It can be very slow, so users can take months to understand the concepts and become confident enough to encourage other people to join in.
- Distribution can be very patchy and fragmented. If two or more wikis are spreading at the same time, then they can create silos of information that are unlinked and may contain duplication.
- The wiki may be seen as subversive by management because the don't understand it or trust it and they may act to suppress it.
Change Management
For someone to start using a wiki, they will need to change some of the ways that they work and that change must be managed effectively to ensure that it is not a negative experience. Most people will initially be somewhat oppositional to change and put up barriers to the change. Steps need to be take to ensure that the transition is as smooth as possible.
The most important thing to communicate about starting to use a wiki is the advantages. This wiki primer aims to provide many good stories and techniques that can be used to encourage the use of the wiki.
Techniques to Introduce a wiki
Management
Manage the adoption of the wiki as a project. It should all of the standard project attributes, such as a plan, goals, resources and a schedule. The project should not be a long one, because the ownership of the wiki should pass into the hands of the users as soon as possible. The project manager needs to be familiar with change management, education issues and should also be a wiki champion who understands the wiki concept thoroughly.
A training program should be considered as part of the wiki adoption project.
Once the project is finished, a good support network needs to be left in place. Wikis do not need a lot of user support and much of the support knowledge can be kept in the wiki itself, but because the wiki site will always be changing and growing, people will sometimes need someone to call.
Social connections
Wikis are social software and the best way to communicate this to new users is to start some social pages. Some examples are:
- Start a page with a list of local shops. Encourage people to add to it and write reviews, experiences etc. Imagine the surprise of the local cafe owner when people from your organisation all know his name! Buyer power might even get some discounts.
- Keep track of a football tipping cometition on the wiki
- Create a social pages area for people to add photos from social activities
- Start a list of gripes about something and encourage people to add their own.
Content
Good quality content is the primary attraction to a wiki and a wiki will not be widely adopted until it contains it. The initial stage of setting up a wiki generally includes populating it with substantial content. Ideally, most content will be in the form of wiki pages, but where a lot of existing content exists, the documents can simply be attached to pages.
Making some content only available on the wiki will make users use the wiki at least for that content. Typically, the content will be easier to find on the wiki than where ever it was previously (especially if the wiki can search the attachment's text) and so new users experience should be a good one.
Encouragement
Wiki novices will often seek out the original author of a page and suggest a fix, or they might just leave a comment. This is a great opportunity to be encouraging and help them to make the change themselves.
Incentives
The most blunt, but perhaps effective tool for getting people involved in the wiki is an incentive program. Incentive programs have been used for knowledge management by many companies, including SAP, De Loite, to mention just a couple.
For many years, SAP use a points system where they allocate points for each contribution to their knowledge management database, in 2006 they introduced a 'wiki points' system to their Confluence based wiki to encourage contributions. Rather than having a rigidly defined system, they have created a model where the users suggest the allocation of points to each other. You can see the current situation at SAP's wiki points page.
A wiki points system could be formalised by by developing a wiki application that gave users a certain number of points that they had to allocate to other users, or content, within a time period. The total points that each user receives could then be mapped back to an incentive system.
The web site usage statistics can also be used for measuring user input for incentives. Indicators such as the number of edits, the number of pages created and the number of comments can all be used to generate activity reports. Confluence has a 'contributors-summary' macro that can be used to produce some basic metrics.
One off competitions are also a good way to get users more involved. An example would be for the users to contribute ideas about a certain initiative (like reducing energy ussage). Users could create a page for each idea, and then the reward would be divided between all of the contributors to the page, based on the quality of their contribution. A vote plugin (such as Confluence's Vote Macro) can be used to allow the users to select the winning entry.
