Mehrotra, Niki (US - Chicago) wrote:
Hi all,
I am new to Wikipedia and am involved in an organization that wishes to
incorporate wiki-style features into an existing internal collaboration
tool. I have looked into Wikipedia's structure and understand that all
processes related to quality control are completely self-driven on the
part of its contributors. What do you think motivates the average user
to contribute as much as he or she does? What incentive do the
individuals have to devote much of their time to monitor pages? One of
our challenges will be getting our organization's members to use the
wiki once we roll it out. Thank you for your time and help.
Promoting a wiki within an organisation is a very different task to
promoting a public wiki, and people will have different motivations for
contributing. I haven't tried it myself, but I'm told that things that
help when promoting an internal corporate wiki are:
* Training -- brief introduction for all employees about how to use the
wiki and what should go in it
* A champion -- someone who gets excited, writes lots of content, and
helps everyone to organise and use the wiki
* Middle-management buy-in -- assuming your organisation is big enough to
have middle-managers, the managers need to promote the use of the wiki
within their own teams.
-- Tim Starling