Motivating Wiki Contributions
OK. So you made a document wiki. But how do you get subject matter experts to contribute? After all, in Wikipedia only a fraction of viewers ever contribute, but that fraction is still a very large critical mass (As of November 2006, Wikipedia receives 200,000 edits a day). This post was motivated by an off-line correspondence with Anne Gentle about motivation for contributors. Anne’s blog Exploring Information Design and Development has many useful and well-written posts about DITA, Wikis and other topics.
So How Does Your Document Wiki Reach a Critical Mass?
You probably don’t need anywhere need 200,000 edits a day – or even a year – for your Wiki to reach a critical mass that it will be interesting enough to attract and retain viewers. But you to need to attain a critical mass. If your users think that most of the reference and how-to information that they need is found in on-line help, your technical document Wiki project will fail.
Incentives, Incentives, Incentives
You could rely on the good will of your subject matter experts to contribute to the Wiki for the common good. Or, you could recall that 20th century efforts to replace personal incentives with altruistic “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” resulted in the deaths of tens of millions from repression and famine under Stalin and Mao.
In the academic world, recognition for contributing knowledge (typically measured by publications) comes in the form of tenure, increased research grants, and – of course – enchanced social status in the community.
A brief and readable academic study “Why Do People Write for Wikipedia? Incentives to Contribute to Open-Content Publishing” by Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman of the Georgia Institute of Technology, describes what incentives work for Wikipedia and provides important lessons for any organization who wants to ensure the success of their own Wiki.
Bottom line: you need to provide incentives.
What Can You Do to Provide Incentives for your Company Wiki?
One approach is just to close down alternative venues. No more RoboHelp, Flare, or WebWorks conversions from Word or FrameMaker. This approach is likely to work for your technical writing staff who, after all, have to put their output somewhere. But, it is unlikely to work for subject matter experts (SMEs) – the engineering, implementation, support and management whose inputs we want and need to reach critical mass.
For SMEs, I suggest recognition. First and foremost recognition. In any organization, but especially in large organizations, ambitious staff need to keep their face in the public view to advance.
- Topic pages should identify contributors and editors.
- User pages should provide metrics for contributors (e.g., started X topics, contributed edits to Y topics, offered Z edits over the last year).
- Topic pages or user pages should offer contributors the possibility of including their picture, real name and/or contact information (e.g. Jane Doe, implementation mananger for new customers in Slovakia.)
Katriel
