Frederik Dohr schrieb:
Hello there,
After reading quite a lot about WikiWikiWebs (mainly for a university paper), I'm convinced that our project team could greatly benefit from employing a wiki. I've already convinced the project manager that we should at least give it a try (mainly by stating how it won't cost a dime). Also, I've set up a local test environment (gotta love XAMPP), mainly for getting to know the MediaWiki engine.
Well, that is a bit off track. Why should people spent their time on an experiment?
Rather: Use the wiki to solve a problem. If the employees share the problem, they have an interest in solving it.
Advertise that use with presentations.
For us, it is the documentation on our IT-System (SAP) with huge amounts of self devoloped coding. It is rather difficult to retrieve information on projects more than two years ago.
b) What's required in terms of basic structure? Certainly some help pages for explaining the wiki syntax (though I'll probably link to Wikipedia rather than create it from scratch), but I'm sure there are a couple of other things to increase acceptance and participation. Due to the large variety of projects people here are working on, it would be very hard to create a comprehensive basic structure right from the start. So I'll have to rely on the users/colleagues to create a kind of self-organizing wiki.
no. you need to give some direction in the beginning. And you need to have some kind of means to force people to use the wiki.
We startet with a simple template for the interfaces to and from our system. It is fairly easy to fill a template article, so the knowledge on how to use the wiki can be very little. Small steps in the beginning.
Then a couple people should find it interesting or rewarding to work in a wiki. Encourage that and help them solve their problems. people talk with another.
Teach the use and the possibilities of the wiki. Half a day is short but a good starter.
Make the wiki mandatory for certain types of information. Mostly it is limited time of the workers, to put down that information. have someone help them with it.
regards, Gunter