Simon Mittag has written a blog post chronicling his work to introduce wiki in his organisation. This is a great first-person account for anyone who is in the process of starting a wiki (or just thinking about it) to read. In 4 Weeks Of Introducing A Wiki Into An Organisation Mittag starts by saying, “I have a great new job. Well it's not really my official job, but I do it anyway — I'm trying to get a wiki adopted by our organisation.â€?

He describes his organisation’s internal information flow as, “gooey, sticky stuffâ€? — a mess of shared drives and email that are inaccessible to consultants in the field, aren’t easily searchable and create a constant versioning problem: “People share information by emailing word, excel and pdf documents around the office. "Read that document? Which version? Bob's version? Who's Bob?" (sound familiar?)â€?.

Based on the first month of introducing Confluence to the 50 or so people in his consultancy, Mittag offers the following lessons:

1. Pick a target — He picked a new project just getting underway as his first target, showed up at the kick off meeting with a meeting agenda page in the wiki, and gave a brief demo, and promised that project content would be made available on the wiki. Four people from that project emailed him within two days of that meeting to get involved on the wiki.
   
   His second target was individual workmates. One by one he gave them demonstrations and accounts, and he discovered that the hook for many people was the people directory. “Personal spaces proved to be a real killer as they helped spread the wiki through the existing social network.�
   



2. Make your entry barriers low — He found that people had lots of questions about just exactly what to do with the wiki — create spaces? pages? — and were uneasy at first with the idea of editing content written by others (I’ve seen this countless times - it’s a result of the isolated culture of the software they’re used to, and the shift to an environment of trust and cooperation with the wiki - it just takes some getting used to for people who have never experienced it before.)
   
   Mittag suggests showing the WYSIWYG editor first (the more advanced users will find wiki markup anyway), set up a space email address (a feature in Confluence that lets you send content to an email address and Confluence puts it in a wiki page), and set up WEBDAV so people can easily attach documents to wiki pages (for certain documents that won’t be edited on the wiki this allows them to be made easily available and obsoletes the cumbersome shared drive, and for other documents it puts them in close proximity to the wiki so that people realize they can just move the content into a wiki page for easy editing.
   



3. Seed Content — An empty wiki page will stay empty because people don’t know where to start, so seed it with some initial content. Mittag’s strategies here are a veritable field guide to applying Wikipatterns. He advises to, “choose your content and your structure carefully, based on whom your target audience isâ€? - a perfect illustration of the Scaffold pattern. With, “don’t do too much or the wiki will look like your personal little empire, and everything people contributeâ€?, he has explained how to avoid the Do it all and OverOrganizer anti-patterns that can erode the feeling of community and drive people away from the wiki.
   
   Another pattern he advocates for is Magnet, in which you, “choose some exclusive content that is laid out nicely which will only appear in the wiki.� This is key to getting people used to going to the wiki as a primary source of information. Mittag says, “I put social events pictures up there and asked someone else to email a notice to everyone that they had found them there. Within 1 day, I got 10 emails requesting login accounts. Exclusive content works!� This example also illustrates the Poker pattern, in which you put some social, non-work content on the wiki (like the weekly Poker game, hence the pattern name!). Since the wiki is a flexible tool that’s not strictly designed to adhere to a narrow definition of “workflow�, putting light, social content on it will further endear its users to it.
   
   Another great example Mittag cites is converting the phone list from an excel file to a wiki page - this makes it easy to update the list, ad having something as practical as the phone list on there makes the wiki that much more useful to people.
   



4. Show them the future — After introducing the wiki by emphasizing its simplicity, it’s important to unleash it a bit and show people the advanced things it can do. This helps people understand the immense potential of the wiki and become ambassadors for it in their own circles.

Mittag’s account of his first month introducing the wiki is an incredibly valuable blueprint for other Wiki Champions helping their organisations move away from the cluttered world of shared drives, email, and countless versions of documents.