Grow a Community Knowledge Garden with Wikipatterns
Wikis. Love them or hate
them. Most people do both.
- · Contributors love the BarnRaising idea of other writers sharing the load as Maintainers, and their vision of Community Write going Viral on a Community Portal.
- · WebpageChampions can Bully the wiki Champions for using OneHammer as All wiki all the time, with cries of ButTheIntranet!
- · Readers hate EmptyPages, Inconsistent Spaces, and a ThreadMess of messy, unstructured material DesignedByCommittee.
- · Managers worry about Vandals, WikiNoobs, and WikiTrolls, and can go into Manager Lockdown and require PageOwnership, Training, and Too much structure.
- · Administrators hate clearing away the unused Sandboxes and abandoned Branch Messes of One Wiki space per Group.
Because everyone
hates stale information.
What’s the solution?
One way is to think of content as alive, an ecosystem of shared ideas that grows
and changes as people ask and answer questions. To think of a wiki as a
community garden, that needs to be seeded, watered, and weeded (especially
weeded!) and harvested before it rots.
Most wikis tend
toward the 90-9-1 Theory:
·
90%
of users are "lurkers" (i.e. they read or browse but don't
contribute)
·
9%
of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate
their time
·
1%
of users participate very often and account for most of the
contributions
Community-supported
agriculture works on the 90-9-1 Theory too:
·
90%
of users are the consumers of their CSA share
·
9%
of users are the volunteers who work a
shift in the garden, but other priorities dominate their
time
·
1%
of users are the farmers who account for most of the
contributions
So, who are the 1% of wikis? A good wiki has a Patron (or Sponsor), a Wiki Charter, some committed WikiGardeners (who are not ContributorsForHire), and a WikiZenMaster to Assess Wiki-Ability and mentor the WikiGnomes. Most of all, a good wiki has Ambassadors who Acknowledge Goodness and create a Welcoming path up the EngagementLadder to
reach Critical Mass.
These
ideas, and many more, can be found online at
“Looking to spur wiki adoption? Want to grow from 10 users to 100, or 1000? Applying patterns that help
coordinate people's efforts and guide the growth of content, and recognizing anti-patterns that
might hinder growth - can give your wiki the greatest chance of
success.
Wikipatterns.com
is a toolbox of patterns & anti-patterns, and a guide to the stages of wiki
adoption. It's also a wiki, which means you can help build
the information based on your experiences!”
Getting your own wiki site on the web, or on your intranet, can be the first step toward having a wiki. But having a plot of land doesn’t make a garden. You need good soil, seeds, water,
tilling, weeding, and all the work of planting and harvesting. Most of all, you
need gardeners of ideas.
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