Wikis For Dummies®

Chapter 16. Ten Roles People Play When Using Wikis

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Reading, contributing, or telling the world about your wiki

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Performing QC or admin duties

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Hosting the wiki or developing its engine

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Creating policies or criticizing the process

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Founding the wiki

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When wikis succeed, they do so to a large degree because they meet the needs of so many different kinds of people. With a wiki, whatever your inclination, there is always a way for everyone to chip in and add his and her special talent or knowledge to the mix. If you look at any successful wiki community, whether it be Wikipedia or an internal wiki inside a company, you will find many different people playing many roles. This chapter is a catalog of those roles that might suggest new ways of having fun with wikis other than those that have already occurred to you.

Reader/Researcher

The most common role that most of us play when interacting with wikis is that of a reader or researcher. We want to find out something, so we use our favorite search engine and are directed to a wiki. Much of the time, people who find information this way don’t know that they’re using a wiki. They just see a nicely formatted page with the information they seek. This is as it should be. The content of a wiki is always more important than the form.

After you see a page, though, knowing that it is part of ...