Wiki That!

A Means to an End

Safe to say that, if asked, most of us would say the people in this picture are ‘riding their bikes’.

But, ask any one of these people what they think they are doing and they will tell you ‘where they are going’. They won’t even mention the bicycle - The bike is only incidental.

Like email, spreadsheets, cell phones, and even bicycles, we were all fascinated and intimidated by the ‘tool' when we were first introduced to it. Over time, however, we have become less aware of the ‘technology’ and more focused on what we are actually accomplishing with it.

We no longer think about ‘learning’ spreadsheets, email, cell phones or even riding a bike. We do it without thinking about the tool. We have tasks to complete and objectives to achieve. When we ride a bicycle, we don’t think about the mechanics or keeping our balance or even the fact that we are riding a bike. We just GO somewhere. It’s a means to an end.

Wikis are the same thing. It’s just an incidental tool – a means to an end.

The challenge with using wikis isn’t so much about learning ‘how' to use it as it is about looking past the fascination and intimidation of a new technology and seeing the possibilities of the tool as a simple, effective means to get more done, better accomplished, and delivered faster by a group of people committed to some common goal.

MediaWiki for Dummies

Nice overview here from Line56 author Demir Barlas about the ease of setting up and using Mediawiki, the underlying platform for Wikipedia.

On hosting a wiki installation:

Using a hosting provider means you don't have to worry about installations, servers, and miscellaneous techie stuff relating to implementation. At Siteground, MediaWiki is not yet an automatically installed script, but you can open a ticket and ask the help desk to install it for you. They usually get it done in a few minutes.

On setting it up:

Specify a subdirectory for your MediaWiki installation. This is a good idea if you want your wiki to be an adjunct of an existing site. Otherwise you can choose to have MediaWiki be your root directory. When MediaWiki becomes active, you will go to www.yoursite.com/wiki, or whatever the subdirectory is, and log in. You can just tell Siteground what you want your login and password to be, and you can log in and change it manually later. You log in as an administrator, which means you are free to tweak the site.

On creating an article (or any topic on a new page):

Let's say your wiki is a discussion of marketing techniques and you want to write to about viral marketing. Do a search for "viral marketing." If someone has created this article already, you'll see a link to it. If not, MediaWiki gives you the option to "create this site." When you click on that link, a text box opens up. Whatever you type and save in there is generated as an article. You can format the article using the toolbar and simple code listed on the MediaWiki site. It's pretty simple stuff. For example, you can just say "Category: Guerilla Marketing" at the bottom of a particular article, and it'll show up in that category, which MediaWiki creates for you.

On editing:

...someone else can go in and edit it via the text box (unless the administrator locks access). This is where MediaWiki really comes into its own. You can create a collaborative document very easily, and MediaWiki's "history" feature preserves all previous versions of the document. So, if there's content vandalism, you can just "revert" to a previous version.

On Benefits:

You can create templates, user classes, and watch lists. You can scale to tens of thousands of users, and a ton of data (Wikipedia is well over 1 million articles). You can wikify anything at all within the enterprise, e.g. to have customer service reps create their own knowledge base, to give executives a place to collaborate on higher-level documents, or to give engineers and product-centric employees a place to input specs and features. If you're dealing with sensitive information, you can patch the MediaWiki instance to keep unwanted eyes out.

Read the article. Its just one more example of a relative newcomer discovering how easy and effective wikis are.

Just Another Good Wiki Overview

In keeping with my objective of raising wiki awareness for a non-technical audience (folks looking to use wikis or improve what they've already started), I like to pass along articles that provide concise, descriptive overviews. This one, from Intelligent Enterprise Magazine, has a descriptive piece that I thought new visitors to this blog would find useful - 'Wikis: Enabling Effective Knowledge Sharing Across The Organization'.

New Year Resolutions (mine)

Like everyone else, I wrestle with resolutions and whether or not to even make resolutions. It's a good way to set some goals though, so here are a few that I hope to deliver in 2006...

• Get my arms around tagging - 'Connection' is the key and I need to master this RSS tagging thing. I'd like this blog to start showing up on Tecnorati, del.ico.us, and other blog tracking tools. I'm a procrastinator when it comes to administivia so I haven't really delved into it other than to find lots of advice that says I should do it. If you have a good resource that lays out the details of 'How', I (and maybe a lot of others) would like to hear from you.
• Get more Comments on my posts. Maybe it's me in that my posting doesn't inspire Commenting or maybe it's just the nature of people who surf from blog to blog, gleaning what they can, and moving on. I know there are blogs out there that inspire plenty of discussion, so I need to find the magic. Maybe some controversy...
• I will post more real world examples and scenarios. Supposedly, 2006 is the year of the wiki so there should be more material to post about, right? In an effort to deliver on this, I'll be creating another reference section - "Public Wikis 4U" - live wiki sites on different topics that you can both contribute to and get some more insights for your own 'Private' wikis.
• Help a couple civic/volunteer organizations get started.
• Get an ISP to sponsor this blog

Some Housecleaning and Additions

I've added some topics, rearranged others, and hopefully enhanced the experience for you. Most notably:

• I've placed Wiki That! related topics on the Right hand side; external links of interest are on the Left;
• 'What The Media Says' - 'wiki' search results from some well-known mainstream media  sources
• 'Enterprise Products' - Vendors that are targeting their offering to the Enterprise
• 'Live Wiki Sites' - Based on various Google searches; a collection of Search Results that link to many live wiki sites
• Ads by Gooooogle  - I couldn't resist and the random ads ARE mostly about wiki!

Oh, and I added this site to 'Wiki Resources' that has a growing collection of other public wiki sites - a good source for getting ideas on how to organize YOUR wiki site behind the firewall.

And please, comments really are welcome :-)

Reader Suggestions

Being new to blogging, I'm learning as I go. I am experimenting with topics and format, so if you think of something I should be doing, let me know. And thanks in advance for th esuggestions ;)

Reader Requests

Is there a particular topic you'd like to explore?

Just add a comment to this post which is permanently displayed under 'Topics and Discussion', in the navigation panel on the left.

What’s in it for me??

Predictably, people have started asking me “what’s in this for you?” regarding my interest in blogging here about wikis. Well, it’s twofold – First, I like the idea of making money doing something I’m passionate about and, second, I can’t do that without publicly promoting wiki usage for a wide variety of groups.

For small groups, projects, and activities, I like this forum for providing observations, advice, and suggestions purely in the interest of promoting acceptance. It raises awareness and provides approaches that are relevant to any group. When the arena expands to the enterprise level, however, there can be some challenges for which people like me may have some expertise that the enterprise would value.

What works for one small group does not necessarily translate for all groups in an enterprise. It is viral, but initiatives like wikis CAN die on the vine and it is not because of software limitations. It has more to do with the soft topics of acceptance, culture, personality, design, resistance, understanding, creativity and buy-in. There is a bit of technique to creating enough momentum such that the wiki solution is self-sustaining and actually generates real benefits.

In addition to the topics I discuss here, I hope to provide more hands-on assistance to enterprises with adoption, structure, consistency, process integration, identifying and assisting ‘champions’, and providing creative approaches to different scenarios. Yes, I like to get paid to do this, but it’s an evolving business model.

The wiki phenomenon is not a passing fad – it will be big. In my opinion, its impact will rival email within a few years. Aside from the few vendors who are getting some initial traction in the enterprise market, no identifiable methodology has emerged yet for providing services. To some degree, I hope I am laying some of the groundwork for that and I guess I’m inviting some competition in the process. But it’s like having several car dealerships along a busy stretch of road – they do better collectively than any one of them would do if they were the only dealership there.

All I know is that this is the first technology I’ve worked with that I can really see having a huge, positive impact on the enterprise. And the interest is just starting to take hold.

First Time Visitor to Wiki That?

If you’ve heard about ‘wikis’ but are not familiar with them, this blog is intended to shed some light on where and how they can be used which is pretty much everywhere 2 or more people need to work together to get something done. It’ll be very focused on that one topic for a target audience that is, I think, pretty big – non-technical people who spend a lot of their time working in a variety of groups and projects.

If you haven’t heard about wikis, you really should find out what they are – it’s pretty likely they will be impacting your professional life in the very near future. Check out these articles in Business Week and InformationWeek.

I won’t be dealing with the technical side of ‘open source’ and developing wiki code. There are dozens of wiki technologies and 1000s of developers writing code for them. I am not a developer and I don’t have a preference for any particular wiki technology. I use whatever makes sense and assist groups in using it to their advantage.

Why am I using a blog instead of a wiki to promote wikis? Because that would be a very public wiki (like Wikipedia) and subject to constant updates (not to mention hacks, graffiti, and spam) by anonymous people – I don’t have the patience or the bandwidth for that. My focus is on private, secure wikis that enterprise groups of trusted teams can use to actually accomplish stuff – not the big, public variety that the mainstream media is reporting on and are basically just huge content management sites (again, like Wikipedia). There are a couple wikis I've set up for you to play with - see the navigation panel on the left.

Also, a blog is more conversational, enjoyable, and enlightening for ‘spreading the word’.

Wiki’s are really easy to use once you start - the hardest part is just getting people started. If you read the ‘About’ section of the blog, I’ve described why the ‘non-developer audience’ needs some assistance to get the most out of it – which is what I do

Alright, time to Rock n Roll (I hope)

Yaknow, maybe to most people setting up one of these blogs is a no-brainer and maybe I'm just revealing myself for the Homer that I am, but I've about had it. For the past 2 weeks (I do have a real job and a real life, so I do this little hobby when I have time), I've been going back and forth with the Typepad folks (hosts of this otherwise really nice blog technology) and now with a domain site (Go Daddy) to get URL 'pointers' pointing the right way.

You may have noticed (both of you), when you link to this site, a funky format (no style sheet, big font, weird format) that would revert to the correct format only when you refreshed (reload for the Firefox folks) the screen. It's still not fully resolved, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I apologize if you've checked out the site and it didn't make sense - I've been trying. I finally broke down, called GoDaddy support, and got led through a short maze of links to put the right info provided by the Typepad support folks into my GoDaddy account.

The Support People on both sides were patient,  knowledgeable, and responsive, but here's the problem (pay attention here, tech service provider management folks) - Your Account Management sites' usability and terminology SUCKS. Give me some clear indexes, intuitive site navigation, REAL FAQs, and simple paths to follow.

It's amazing how this cultural attribute has remained constant for the 20+ years I've been in the technology arena - tech providers and developers do NOT (or can not) see the world through the eyes of people who use the technology.

In any event, I'll restate someting I mentioned several posts back - setting up my first wiki was far easier than setting up this blog has been. I have an interesting article about a West Coast event that is kind of related to this issue. Stay tuned.