The Wiki Dilemma

There was a new review by Tony Chung of Alan Porter’s WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit at TechWhirl this week.

The review got me thinking about the use of wikis, and more generally, about why wikis are not used as much as they might be.

Our experience with Alan’s book, which was written, edited, indexed, and reviewed on a wiki, was uniformly excellent. We were able to shorten the back end effort, especially the reviewing and editing process, by using a wiki, and we were still able to produce good, clean DocBook for our final production processing.

However, it seems like wiki usage, with the notable exception of Wikipedia, is not growing like I’d expect it to. A recent Google search for terms related to wikis — for example, “business wiki” — turned up surprisingly few hits, with some on the front page as much as six years old. Since Google favors recent content, this is indicative of a less-than-robust adoption curve.

Another indicator that’s closer to home is the XML Press authors wiki, which is open to anyone who writes for XML Press. I find it useful, and do my best to put useful information on the wiki, but usage is spotty and usually only occurs when I point someone to the site for a particular piece of information.

Given that it is very to set up and use wiki software — you don’t even need to set up the software; there are plenty of free or inexpensive hosted wikis where you can get started in a couple of minutes — especially compared to how hard it is to set up Content Management Systems and other common, and popular software systems, it’s clear that wiki usage is not affected by difficulty-of-use problems.

So, why don’t we see much greater adoption of wikis?

My initial thoughts on this — and I’d welcome input from readers — is that there are two factors at play:

1. Lack of a compelling need: unlike some technologies, which can be used by an individual productively, nearly all wikis depend on interaction within a group of people. Unless that group already has both a reason to interact and can gain some benefit from interacting via a wiki, there is no real incentive for them to use the wiki. I suspect that many wikis are set up by well-meaning people who have not considered whether a wiki is the right tool to address their particular problems. When they see low usage, they give up and assume that wikis aren’t for them.
2. Lack of a strong core of participants: you need at least a few dedicated people, including yourself, who are active participants. It takes consistent and frequent work to keep a wiki going, and if you believe the 90-9-1 rule(1), you’re only going to get really active participation from a small percentage of your users. And, if you aren’t in that one percent of active users, don’t expect anyone else to be there for you.

It is a truism of technology adoption that human issues are the strongest factors that lead to the success or failure of a project. I think that with wikis this is even more pronounced and is easier to detect, since wikis are so directly social. That said, I think that over time, as we learn where and how to use (and not use) wikis, we will find that they are a powerful tool that any organization can find useful, if they take the care to apply them correctly.

(1) The 90-9-1 rule says that one percent of the people using your wiki (or other social media platform) will be active users, nine percent will be occasional users, and the rest will be casual users or non-participants.