Proper Uses of Wikis

Thursday, November 19 2009 - , , ,

After my recent post about blogs and forums, I was posed the following question on the HFI Certified Usability Analysts site:

Great article to luminate the strengths of blogs and forums. I have a slightly off-topic question on wikis. They are quickly gaining adoption in businesses. They are also suffering similar problems with correct application. How would you define the use of wikis compared to blogs, and especially, forums?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic, both because of this question and some past work.  What are some valid uses for wikis?  When is it right to use a wiki versus a blog or a forum?  How can a wiki provide value to the users of a particular site?  All these questions and more come into my head, and honestly, it was very difficult to answer those questions.  Wikis are a very unique concept, and I haven’t found very many good uses for wikis overall.  Below are a few uses for wikis along with some pitfalls to avoid and how to know when a wiki is the right choice for you.

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is essentially a collaborative website.  It is a way for multiple users to all contribute to the content for one or multiple pages on the site.  Rather than just posting comments on a blog post, or replies to a forum thread, the users are changing the actual content of the page itself, not just adding additional voices.  The users that edit the wiki are also typically consumers of the website as well, rather than just having staff editors maintaining content.

The most prominent and well known wiki is almost definitely Wikipedia.  Most people probably would not know what a wiki is if it weren’t for Wikipedia.  As such, most examples of wikis “in the wild” are very similar to that of Wikipedia: online repositories of information about a particular topic.  You can find wikis for just about any topic imaginable – just check out some of the discrete topics available on wiki creation site Wikia:

Other Uses for Wikis

Obviously, you can use a wiki for an encyclopedia-like application.  What other uses are out there for wikis?  This gets a little bit tougher.  Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

 

Theme-Specific User Generated Content

When I was working on the website for Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine, the business people were asking themselves the exact same question, because Community Server now provides a wiki as one of its available modules.  There was nothing forcing us to use the wiki, but since it was available, they felt that they needed to find a way to use it.  What they came up with was a travel wiki.  In reality, this still isn’t very different from the encyclopedia-like wikis mentioned above, but it does highlight a way to use a wiki integrated into the theme of your website.  Every Day with Rachael Ray is a general lifestyle magazine, and trendy places to check out while on vacation fits into this theme quite nicely.  If your website has a specific theme that easily lends itself to user generated content (UGC), a wiki might be a good thing to use.

There are a few important things to remember about using a wiki on your site, and this is especially important in cases like this.  The most vital thing to consider is that this content is going to be viewed by other users of the site, not just those that contribute this data.  This is important for two reasons: first, users may not realize that this content is not editorially controlled.  Since a wiki ideally looks like any other content page, it doesn’t stand out as different from your articles like blog comments or forum threads do.  Do you really want content widely distributed that is written by anyone that happens upon your site?  I have seen countless stories on CNN and other news sites where students and others take information on Wikipedia and use it as fact, without any further checking because they don’t truly understand that a wiki is not reviewed by professional editors, like other site content is (or at least should be).  Having a wiki on your site is going to open you up to the exact same issues, and you need to be prepared for that in advance.

The second thing to consider with this is the formatting of your wiki.  Because anyone visiting your site could view this content, and ideally, you want them visiting the wiki (otherwise why would you have it?), you need to make sure that the content provided by contributors looks good.  You need to consider if allowing free-form WYSIWYG editing is worth the possibility of having a page that aesthetically looks very bad, or if you want to force your users to a limited formatting toolset, while enforcing a certain structure to what is being displayed.  Both methods have their pluses and minuses.  I believe that Wikipedia only gets away with its fairly open formatting rules because it has so many contributors that very few pages will end up with poor formatting for very long before someone else comes in and fixes it.  Most wikis will not get nearly the amount of traffic as Wikipedia, so they need to be sure to enforce a certain amount of formatting and content rules to make sure that the content at least looks good.

Organizational Knowledge Base

Again, this is kind of like an encyclopedia, but it is normally used internally within an organization, and it is limited to a specific domain of knowledge.  Many software developer organizations use wikis to share coding tricks and intricacies of ongoing and legacy projects.  Support processes and human resources information are a couple more examples of how wikis are used for an organizational knowledge base.

Project Management

This is a fairly new idea, but I have seen it in use more often recently.  Rather than some highly specialized (and often poorly designed) project management tool, a wiki can be used.  Document collaboration is obviously the easiest use, but project schedules can be posted, reviewed, commented upon and updated by anyone with the proper rights.  Since every change is documented, it is easy to see who changed the schedule, when, and any changes that happened to other project pages around that time.  It is easier to associate the schedule change with a requirement change because both documents are in a single system.  Yes, it is true that a wiki doesn’t provide Gant charts or any of those other reporting aspects that a project management app can provide, but for most of the project team, those items really don’t provide any value.  The project manager can maintain his own project file if he wants to, and just copy the resulting data into the wiki, for others to view.  In this situation, it is an additional step, but it is fairly minor, and makes things a lot more efficient for the rest of the project team.

When to Use a Wiki

As mentioned above, you want to be careful when you decide to use a wiki.  If you aren’t going to be okay with people editing each others’ content, then you should just stop right now, and move on to something else.  If you’re still here, then make sure that a wiki is the right solution for your problem?  Are you looking for discussions?  If so, then forums are your answer, not a wiki.  Only use a wiki if you want collaboration among users within a single topic, because a wiki is really only valuable when multiple users work together to provide information.

You also need to make sure that you have a user base that will provide content.  When first starting your wiki, this will probably mean that your editorial staff is going to need to spend a significant amount of time (or money, to pay other people) to fill out content that drives your users to the wiki for both consumption and contribution.  A good rule of thumb is that you will probably need at least 100 users viewing the wiki for every one that you want contributing to it.  That number is going to depend on your user base, because some groups are inherently more active than others, but it is a good starting point.  If your site is new as well, my recommendation is to not bother with a wiki at the start, until you already have a significant user base or significant daily traffic.  The worst thing that you can have with regards to any sort of user generated content is stale content, or very little content overall.

Conclusion

I hope that this has proved helpful to you in your pursuit of a good wiki.  Wikis really are a unique social media construct, and can really provide some great value to your organization in the right situation.  I’ve provided a few quick ideas here, along with some pitfalls to watch out for and avoid.  These should get your creative juices flowing, so if you come up with any great and creative uses for wikis, please let me (and others) know in the comments below.

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