[Mediawiki-l] corporate wiki: success factors?

[JTAutry]

Here are my thoughts for what its worth.

In order for the wiki to succeed you have to first and foremost have the stamp of approval by someone with authority.  They don't need to be 100% sold on it, they just have to allow you to use it and to give others access to it.  That should be an easy sell.

Second, you have to put relevant useful content on the wiki that people need access to.  Pay attention to docs that people are always looking for, modifying, etc.  For example, we currently have no way to track individual projects here, we're a small shop and most things just get done in a couple days, no big deal.  So when I setup the wiki, the first thing I did was setup a project template and put everything I was working on at the time onto the wiki.  I setup a project status page that had rolled up info on all the current projects.  When my boss or his boss wanted an update, I told them to check the wiki.  They were blown away by the thought of having a quick snapshot of what everyone was working on, documentation, links to folders on the network for source code, production directories etc.

Another example was a lot of our network documention.  I'm a programmer by title, but have some authority over the network side of things, so this particular approach may not work for you!  I took some of the more static docs to start, like server info docs, howto's, etc, and put them on the wiki.  i then DELETED the docs from the network.  Guess our net admin is going to learn to use the wiki :)  

To sum up, make a case for the wiki to get approval to use it.  And then use the heck out of it.  You'll have some early adopters that will see its usefulness to the organization as a whole and use it, not everyone has the 'what's in it for me' mentality.  Those that DO will simply be forced to use it once it becomes integrated into the standard practices of the org.

Good luck!

JT


 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.
http://new.mail.yahoo.com