However, Wikipedia is not the real world.
I've learned this from my time working at Atlassian, where using our enterprise wiki is standard behaviour. We store our corporate knowledge on the wiki, host discussions on the wiki, share our personal joys and frustrations on the wiki. However, Wikipiedia is not the real world. Allow me to explain...
"It'll be vandalised!"
This is the first thing people say when they conceive of a wiki within the enterprise. However, it simply isn't the case, for several reasons:
- All edits are tracked by name and date — simply turn off anonymous access!
- The content is written by fellow staff members so it's less likely people will want to offend
- Politics, religion and sport are rarely the topic of enterprise wikis, so people aren't driven to vandalism due to emotional reasons
"I don't want people editing whatever they want!"
Our internal wiki at Atlassian can be edited by anyone in the company, with the only exception being the staff HR policy pages. Strangely enough, however, I have noticed that very few people update another person's pages even though they have the ability and social permission to do so. Instead, the practice has arisen to add comments to pages rather than edit.
I'm not sure why this is — perhaps people think that editing is tantamount to trespass. Perhaps it's because opinion is not fact, so they'd rather add their opinion as a comment or suggestion, and let the original author update the page as appropriate. Nonetheless, it suggests that Wikipedia is not the real world.
"A wiki is fine for reference material, but not for communication"
Not so. Communication is alive and well thanks to Confluence's News and Comments capabilities.
News is like posting your own blog — readers can even subscribe via an RSS feed. Within Atlassian, we use News to inform staff about upcoming events, discuss product features and swap interesting stories. Unlike e-mail, the News is kept on the wiki, available for future reference and commenting.
Comments are, indeed, the currency of the Internet. Amazon's product reviews are a perfect example. It's a way people can contribute to existing information. Our public documentation for Confluence is another example. People can not only read the documentation, they can comment on it.
The ability to comment on pages can also be found on Wikipedia, but it is hidden behind Wikipedia's Discussions tab. It's just one big page that people can edit, which makes it hard to follow the flow of conversation. Comments in Confluence, however, show who said what and when, and even includes a picture of the contributor.
"I don't want people wasting their time posting silly information"
Welcome to the world of Knowledge Management. It's only by encouraging staff to post information that knowledge is built and maintained. People aren't your most important asset — their knowledge is! Are you capturing your knowledge, or is it walking out the door each night?
You'll never know unless you try. People aren't paid to use Wikipdeia, but they still use it. Maybe you just need ways to encourage wiki adoption.
Just remember — Wikipedia is not the real world. But it is close. :)
References:
- Your wiki isn't Wikipedia (wikipatterns.com)
- Corporate Wiki Usage? on LiveJournal
7 Comment(s)
I'd be interested to see the Global statistics for your internal wiki. How many edits a day are you getting?
By Charlie at September 21, 2007 11:47 AM
As well as doing stuff around Wikipedia, I've been saddled with our work wikis, and by crikey there's a few of them. I think office wikis are one of the best things ever, if you're in a workplace where at least a few people actually try to get work done. "Think of it as a big office whiteboard."
By David Geard at September 21, 2007 8:06 PM
I'm not really sure what you mean by that - I could turn around and say that Confluence is not the real world. Wikipedia is a real wiki, meaning that anyone can edit it, and of course it has all the problems (and benefits) associated with that. Confluence is more like an easy-to-edit CMS. No doubt it's great for enterprise users, but it's not really a wiki.
By River Tarnell at September 21, 2007 9:26 PM
If Confluence is just a CMS, then you cannot really claim it as a Wiki. I like Wikis because they are like Wikipedia - both the good and the bad. I don't want an enterprise level CMS that has some wiki-like plugin. As the old saying goes, a jack of all trades but a master of none. I want a tool that is a master at being a wiki - like Wikipedia.
Software developers use Wikis for a reason - in particular because it is not a CMS.
Sean
By Sean Kelley at September 24, 2007 1:38 PM
I'd too be interested to see the Global statistics for your internal wiki. How many edits a day are you getting?
By sam at September 25, 2007 3:21 AM
Deploying a wiki to a limited audience doesn't make it any less a wiki. John's point is just that when the wiki is deployed within a company, the fact that people are accountable for their actions creates a significant bias against vandalism.
As for the Atlassian intranet, we don't have the usage plugin installed, so the numbers aren't immediately at hand. Maybe some other day I'll hit the database for something more accurate, but now here are some global statistics. (Atlassian currently has about 120 employees worldwide)
106,600 revisions of 10,400 pages, by 176 unique authors, with 2300 comments.
3,000 blog posts by 130 unique authors with 5,700 comments.
It's hard to work out any "rate" information from these numbers because the data is so uneven. For one thing the company has doubled in size every year since the wiki's inception, and the introduction of some features (like personal spaces) have caused spikes of adoption.
Different spaces have different characters. The most edited space is the support space, which is about a year and a half old, and has 20,000 edits across 270 pages. Most personal spaces average two edits per page, reflecting their significantly less collaborative nature.
Blogging, meanwhile, was a late starter. We only started internal blogging in earnest about a year ago when we released Confluence's personal space feature, and made a concerted effort to get everyone in the company subscribed to the internal feeds.
The most prolific blogger is (er...) me, with 200 posts. Four spaces have more than 100 posts, 16 more than 50, and about 75% of the company has blogged at least ten times in the last year (and half of the company wasn't _here_ a year ago!).
By Charles Miller at September 25, 2007 5:08 PM
And... here's a totally bogus comparison of the Atlassian intranet with Wikipedia. :)
Number of pages: 10,000 vs 10,000,000 (1:1000)
Number of authors: 176 vs 5,400,000 (1:30,000)
Average #edits per page: 10 vs 16
(The authors count is a bit of a cheat, since Wikipedia doesn't provide a count of unique authors, only the number of registered accounts.)
By Charles Miller at September 25, 2007 5:30 PM