Wiki Champions
management, software development
I’m the wiki champion at work. It didn’t start out that way. We brought Confluence in house at the urging a motivated tech lead. The champion set up the wiki and ran training sessions for a while. Soon after they moved on to another position and I inherited the wiki champion belt:
A passionate, enthusiastic champion is essential to the success of wiki because s/he will be able to generate interest, give the appropriate amount of training for each person at the right time, monitor growth of the tool and fix problems that could derail adoption.
Turns out I probably am responsible for 25-33% of the current activity on our wiki. I dump everything there from velocity logs on projects to tips on troubleshooting build problems. I’m still trying to gently drive adoption since I want to avoid the “All wiki all the time” pattern.
If you hear people saying, “Oh no. Not another wiki!” you might be moving too fast. Pushing to use the wiki for everything too quickly can hinder its adoption for several reasons. People might not feel comfortable with the wiki yet - it’s a paradigm shift for most people to imagine using a site that doesn’t require approval to post content, and where others can edit or even delete what they’ve written.
Ed Gibbs @ April 9, 2007
Ed,
Thanks for mentioning Wikipatterns! I appreciate that you’re helping spread the word!
If there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know.
Stewart Mader
Wiki Evangelist, Atlassian
No problem, one of our managers found it and forwarded the link. We’re still trying to grow it beyond the development groups with some success, but the ability to edit a page has been a bit disconcerting for some of our command and control folks.