Wikipatterns

Chapter 5. Drive Large-Scale Adoption

During the pilot, it's possible — and necessary — to handpick the groups that will benefit most from early wiki use, have people that are motivated to use new tools, and make excellent, representative examples of wiki use. Large-scale adoption is a much more complex endeavor because the ultimate goal is to get everyone using the wiki. This means that instead of working with a few dozen users, you're likely dealing with a few hundred, and the profile of users changes as well. Not all will be as eager as the early adopters, but their reasons are legitimate and it's incumbent upon you to convince them.

This is where careful planning and use of wiki patterns come into play. Planning allows you to scale the guidelines and practices you've developed during the pilot, so that others can use them in a more widespread way. Because large-scale adoption involves so many more people, patterns bring a level of commonality and consistency to the many different spaces being created by groups throughout the organization.

Develop a Wiki Use Policy

Writing a wiki use policy can be a great way to organize wiki use, help you clarify answers to questions that new users will likely ask when they get started, and remind people of some common sense approaches to how they handle information on the wiki.

Let's take a look at an excellent example of a use policy. Sun Microsystems is using wikis for collaboration among people both inside and outside the company, and has spaces ...