We use a wiki in our IS dept at work. The Sys Admins and DBA's love it but the PC/Desktop techs refuse to use it. They claim it won't help them...but they're currently using out-dated text databases for stuff so I don't see why it wouldn't. If anything it'd make it easier because they don't have a very good search function for all that old stuff :-)

I've attempted to use wikis on a number of programming projects over the past decade, and participated in some just for discussions. One or two grew and attracted enthusiastic participation, at least until the topics were exhausted. But most of these attempts have failed because not enough people were interested in using the wiki to make it worth the effort. There seems to be a threshold in the number of users needed to make it work and continue to be used. On some, there'd be an initial enthusiasm with half a dozen people participating, but it would gradually drop back to one or two users and then die. On ohers, one just couldn't interest people in participating. Partly this is because the wiki concept was new and people didn't feel like climbing another learning curve. Partly it was because the technology was rather primitive. Modern wiki's are easier to use; especially important is the ability to add attachments, as drawings and charts are important aspects of conveying designs -- when they couldn't be added to the wiki, the wiki became "extra work" instead of the primary means of communicating -- email became preferred.

Clearly, the number of people participating is limited by the size of the pool of potential users, only some of whom will use it. So something like Wikipedia has a better chance of success than a project that's of interest to at most 10 people. The value will depend on how easy it is to communicate otherwise. If everyone is in the same building and see each other frequently, it's less likely to succeed than if the same number of people are geographically dispersed or work different hours.

Joe

I looked after an internal wiki pilot here in the UK in a large organisation until I left a couple of months ago. We started towards the end of 2004 making the wiki available to all people in the organisation, not just programmers or project managers. By deliberately keeping it low key and evangelising on a personal level to any who would listen we slowly built usage.

Important things in making it a success:

• Let people discover and use it, building a sense of ownership
• Treat it as a garden, it needs pruning, mulching, weeding and new shoots need encouragement
• Don't expect miracles overnight
• Do expect people to use it for unexpected things
• Keep enthusing all you talk to
• Guide people into best practise
• Expect many more to read than write or edit, it's not a problem. About 30% of our total user-base actually created content. Readers will likely as not create and edit in other contexts later
• Some 3% of the spaces accounted for 60% of the pages

Numbers do make a difference. There comes a tipping point where many more people start piling in because that's where the action is. Getting to the tipping point is the tricky bit.

In these times of outsourced IT one thing we heard again and again was "it's fantastic that I can just do this without having to ask anyone". Empowerment is what it's all about.

JMH

I believe that a wiki succeeds if it has some useful content on it; it only fails if it becomes overrun by spam or goes offline; I have encountered several such failed wikis. However, the biggest success that I have experienced is http://nethack.wikia.com - more than 1300 articles about the computer game NetHack, with several editors participating. Now I run my own wiki at http://kernigh.pbwiki.com - literally a Personal Wiki Experience.

contributed by xkernigh@hidden on Sep 1 9:08pm