Wikis in Organizations

Following best practices is the royal road to success for a lot of today’s companies. The basic idea behind this approach to management is of course to learn from the best in the business and thus to avoid all the trouble of learning from your own mistakes. No need to get your hands dirty, right?

Unfortunately, the world is just a little more complex than that. Others’ best practices may well work for them, but there is no guarantee that they work for you. On the contrary, it is more likely that they don’t work for you at all. Reasons are easy to come by: Different products, different markets, different organizations, and so on, and so forth.

Instead of doing what others do best, try avoiding what others do worst. It is much more harder to follow best practices than to stay away from worst practices. With respect to managing wikis in organizations, then, here are the top 3 worst practices:

Employee Motivation. Managers keep asking me how they can properly motivate their employees to work with the wiki. Some already tried giving away incentives for edits (”Ten edits for a free cup of coffee, a thousand for a trip to Vegas!”), others make writing a part of employees’ workload (”A thousand edits by the end of the year and you’ll be fine!”). I always answer them with a counter question: Why do you have to motivate your employees at all? My point is to give your employees the benefit of the doubt. They don’t need extra motivation to work with the wiki as long as they see a benefit in using it.

The Purpose. What’s the purpose of the wiki? There is no more central question that managers have to answer before they go about telling someone from IT to install a wiki for all other employees (and not just the nerds in IT who had a perfectly running wiki for years). So, what is the purpose of your wiki? Say it in one sentence, even one word, I dare you. If you cannot answer in simple words such as “software documentation,” “to-do lists,” or “project notes,” then you may need to rethink you mission statement (you have a mission statement, don’t you?). The purpose of the wiki directly translates into the benefit that, ultimately, employees see in using the wiki.

Management. Yes, that’s right, management is the worst practice of them all. A wiki is a highly democratic medium. There is no easier way of killing it than imposing layers and layers of management upon it. Avoid managing your employees’ interest by making them “page patrons” or the like (so that each employee is responsible for some particular page or pages). If they are experts in some field, they will want to pass on their knowledge in one way or another. And if you can’t get some of them to put down what they know on a wiki page, well, maybe then a wiki is not the right way to do it (try making an interview-type podcast, most experts just love to talk about their work). Instead of putting up roles and rules, think of irritating a wiki by introducing a code of conduct (but be sure to put it in the wiki itself).

These are certainly the worst practices for managing wikis in organizations that we came across in our research. There are others, of course. And maybe even best practices, who knows.

The Lorenz curve is a graphical representation of social inequality of some sort. For example, economists use it to display the income distribution for households. The Gini coefficient further condenses the Lorenz curve into a single measure. And last in line is the Pareto principle, sometimes referred to as the 80/20 rule, which is a frequent observation of a certain distribution of of social inequality.

All of these well-known concepts easily apply to research on corporate and public wikis. A first shot is to plot the cummulative distribution of revisions against users to gain an insight into the inequality of work done in wikis. Of course, whether or not revisions are a good measure for work is arguable, not the least because the quality of revisions is a completely different issue.

At any rate, Jimmy Wales claims that the top 2% of all Wikipedians account for more than 80% of the work in total. Not so much Pareto, obviously. Still, his claim is rather well informed, as our below plot confirms.

What’s more interesting is that corporate wikis very well display the 80-20 rule. So there you go, another hint that corporate wikis don’t obey the laws of the public sphere where people come and go as they please. After all, membership in an organization more or less establishes a firm user base of corporate wikis, especially if there is no other means to and end. The silver bullet for making your wiki a success is thus to give your employees no other choice of media.