Wikis are easy to use but sometimes new users are hesitant to jump right in and become contributors. Here's a list of some common excuses for not contributing to the content on a wiki.
Collective editing
Many apprehensive users are uncomfortable with collective editing. The idea that someone can edit your text on the Web really is a key reason why some are hesitant to use wikis. However, the concept does not seem quite as dangerous if you think of your site as a whiteboard. You and your colleagues likely could use a whiteboard to collaborate on the solution to a problem -- all sharing the whiteboard, adding, deleting, and modifying its content until you come to a solution through collaboration. A wiki takes the whiteboard analogy one step further -- consider a room with multiple whiteboards. Each page of the wiki becomes its own whiteboard that users can share and can easily add links to other pages. For those sites where it is necessary to manage or to control who edits the content, most wikis support features like permissions (e.g., page access control) and may also be either public or private (e.g., limited user group).
Misbehavior on wikis
Several common problems have been identified for wikis, or sites which allow anyone to create or to edit content:
- Spamming - the addition of inapplicable content to a page by individuals in order to increase their websites' page ranking on search engines
- Content deletion - the deletion of text from a page that was entered by another contributor
- Flame wars - wikis depend upon cooperation among the community to avoid the flame wars that often plauge e-mail, discussion groups, and blogs. Many wikis either implicitly or explicitly encourage people to contribute material that most people would find objective. The NPOV (neutral point of view) is emphasized on some wikis, such as Wikipedia.
- Vandalism of content - deliberately and maliciously deleting and/or changing content on the page (e.g., adding obscene content)
In active wikis, you'll notice that such bad behavior is not generally tolerated. I have found that the "page watch" feature, where I'm notified when changes are made to a page, is very helpful in enabling me to quickly handle the spammers and vandals that visit my public wikis. Content is often corrected fairly quickly using the revision history view and the feature to revert content. Also, some wikis provide the ability to "ban" (by IP address) someone from editing the wiki if they are known trouble-makers. Of course, if installed within an enterprise in your corporation (as opposed to a wiki on the World Wide Web), the chances the above bad behavior will occur may be much lower.
When managing a wiki site, you also need to watch for duplication of effort (e.g., multiple pages created on the same topic), inconsistent content, and general neglect (e.g., information is out-of-date). Through an active content development community and attention to healthy usage patterns, you may find the wiki to be very helpful as a realtime solution for easily developing web content and collaborating.
Image credit: Spider's Parlor Productions
If you have information to share, you can use a wiki. Better yet, if you would like to work with others to create or to maintain information, you can use a wiki. If you can access the Internet using a web browser on your computer, you can use a wiki. You can reach new heights by using a wiki with your group.
