Monday, November 9, 2009

To wiki or not to wiki? How to deploy a wiki.

If you are thinking about starting a wiki and don't know where to begin, the website that I recommend above all others is wikipatterns.com and was a huge help in deployment and management when I deployed a wiki at my last company. We took a lot of ideas from there. They also have a book by the same name with some case studies that all of our deployment team purchased and read as part of the planning.

We were concerned about several things, mainly the two biggest barriers to wikis: 1) How do we get started, and 2) if everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible. We used the "barn-raising" technique to get the ball rolling. We started with a "Panel of Experts." After they planned and created the basic premise and taxonomy of the site, The Panel of Experts along with all of our business heads and content managers got together for a three-day session to deploy the content. There were about 20 people in all and We made it really fun - had lunch brought in and contests for the people who were entering content, like who could find the most spelling errors during proofreading, and who could wear the goofiest hat. Sounds corny, I know - but it really worked to create enthusiasm around the concept.

The maintenance plan was a was a little harder to decide on. We didn't want to restrict changes to the content too much, because then people would not take ownership or it, but we didn't want to make it a free-for-all either. We settled on a panel of content managers that would set alerts on certain areas of content and when changes were made, they would review them for accuracy on a daily basis. We originally thought that it would be better to have administrators be the only users who could publish changes, but thought that there was probably a good chance of them forgetting to publish the content and then the changes would never happen. We decided that the few people who made incorrect changes were an acceptable risk in order to have all people with buy-in be able to contribute and see their changes in real time. We also made it public knowledge that there was no such thing as "anonymous" in SharePoint, which probably prevented a number of incorrect or inappropriate postings. However, the idea of having all users be able to make edits or create new pages and then have someone else be able to review and publish those changes to a live site is a very viable way to handle this issue and fully supported with out-of-the box Sharepoint.

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