Getting people involved, keeping people involved

Ten ways to get people involved and to keep people involved on your wiki

One of the biggest challenges in managing a wiki is getting people involved -- and keeping them involved. In the last post, some techniques were covered on how to get people involved on your wiki and a video series on wiki adoption was provided. Today, I'd like to cover a few tips from some top wiki organizers on Wetpaint, some Super Painters. Here are some techniques they use to get people involved on their wikis and to keep them comin' back for more!

1) Utilize the member messaging features of your wiki service: send a welcome note to new members and keep your members up-to-date on recent updates.
2) Be responsive: answer questions from site visitors or community members quickly
3) Keep site content up-to-date: visitors will not be encouraged to come back if the content is out-of-date and is not maintained
4) Update the site frequently: visitors will return to see what's new
5) Host contests on the wiki: get people involved; create buzz
6) Conduct polls: schedule weekly or monthly voting
7) Create a custom help page for your wiki (rather than hosting help page): make sure they know who to contact for help or for more information
8) Provide good moderation: accept differing points of view, but make sure people stay on discussion point and make sure members do not make personal attacks or call each other names; use 'page watch' features and correct site vandalism on public wikis quickly
9) Promote featured content from your wiki on its home page: provide links to featured pages or articles, discussion threads, contests, or polls
10) Recognize the contributions of your members: feature a top contributor on the home page; publicize a listing of the top contributors; give top contributors additional authority (e.g., moderator authority); send a message of "thanks" to top contributors

Do you have other suggestions for getting and keeping people involved on a wiki? Post a comment on this blog and share it with us.

Build it and they will come

Build it and they will come? Maybe so, but maybe not. One of the challenges in managing an active wiki is getting people involved – and not in just reading, but in contributing to its content. Here's a link to Ross Mayfield's blogpost about an adoption strategy for social software in the enterprise.

Here are some suggestions to getting like-minded people involved on a wiki with you:

• Post a message on a relevant forum
  
• Link to your wiki from relevant newsgroups and message boards
  
• Find those who are blogging about your topic and post a comment referencing your wiki
  
• Place a campaign for assistance on a relevant Talk Page on other related wikis
  
• Work with your wiki host to ensure the code it’s generating is search engine friendly so that it will be found easily
  
• Submit your URL to search engines
  
• Create relevant tags for the wiki content
  
• Volunteer to speak at a local meeting of a club or association related to your topic
  
• Put your wiki’s URL in your e-mail signature
  
• Ask others who are hosting websites related to your topic to consider posting a link to your site and you, in turn, add a link to theirs on yours
  
• In your organization, select a wiki champion, who is knowledgeable about wikis, will be an advocate of wikis as a best practice in collaboration, and will coach employees

Do you have other suggestions? Post a comment to tell us what you think.

Here's a video by Stewart Mader on how to grow wiki adoption:

As posted on YouTube by slmader

You don't want to miss his video series 21 Days of Wiki Adoption



Image credit: Original photo CC by license in Flickr User Start Cooking