One of the most common, and thanks to Wikipedia most visible, uses of a wiki is creating a participatory knowledgebase--a shared knowledge resource that is created and maintained by a distributed community. I've built quite a few of these, first at McKinsey, and in my current role at Socialtext. Here are three top-of-mind high-level best practices based on pitfalls I've seen some companies start to fall into:
Structure by topic, not by organization. Every participatory knowledgebase I've ever worked on has started with participants assuming that the wiki's structure would mirror their own internal organizational structure. Bad idea. The whole point of the wiki is its ability to bring people together and connect dots across organizational silos. That won't happen if you structure the wiki around those very silos.
Lead with what you want, not what you have. Many groups, especially research groups, tend to use the wiki as a dumping ground for research they've already done. This research typically takes the form of reports which were written for a specific audience to answer a specific question at a specific moment in time. So the value of the reports themselves isn't so great. What is valuable, however, is the insights embedded in those reports. That's what contributors should be encouraged to post to the wiki. Put differently, a page called "Trends in Retail Channel Marketing" is a better wiki page than "2006 Analysis of our Company's Channel Marketing Spend". (Of course, the report might be useful as backup--so include it as a link from the main page on trends).
Link link link. New contributors don't cross-link. They're not usually averse to it; they just don't think to do it. Encourage them to "linkify" any term (yes, I mean any term) in their entries that is either proprietary vocabulary, potentially unclear to some readers, or describes a strategic concept where the company might have proprietary insights. These three criteria cover a pretty broad range of terms, and in even a short (e.g., 1-2 paragraph) entry, you can probably find at least a half-dozen terms that should be links...even if the underlying pages don't exist yet.
These are 3 great pointers in building a knowledge base. Thanks for sharing.
I added them to four pointers I posted on my blog:
http://ekive.blogspot.com/2008/04/is-sharepoint-collaboration-platform-or.html
Posted by: Mark Scrimshire | April 02, 2008 at 03:16 PM