How can wiki software help with engagement?
easier, less intimidating
help people hit the edit button
wysiwyg
how do you get people engaged? what features help increase engagement?
conceptualizing the idea of a wiki – what's the wiki way? allowing other people to edit your space to make it our page
how do you convey to users the wiki way?
learn by experience, there is an “aha” moment when somebody improves what you started and you realize the power of the wiki
how do you et to a good synthesis of ideas?
is there software that can help encourage collaboration and interaction?
person to person - how do you scale it?
v1 of wiki software was super simple for pete
somebody created an application in text (workflow example – forced people to edit a wiki page to determine the work someone was working on)
the less features a wiki has, the more people figure out new applications for it
then people have a sense of ownership and evangelize
we've gotten to a stage where wiki software has to be polished or else nobody touchees it
now we need wysiwyg to draw people in, but when they really get into it, they don't need the pretty features
confluence wiki was way too busy too much stuff
one place this doesn't work well is discussion pages
on wikihow, discussion pages are more like posting to a discussion board, easy to post, but not as organized
comments help retain contributors
wikhow has a kudos page for contributors that users can thank authors that's worked really well
social reinforcement is important and effective
wiki world is great with the tech savvy younger generation, but it's pretty foreign for older people (and a lot younger people too)
time ordering of comment sis simplest - socialtext puts the comment button right next to the edit button, no talk pages
comments get put at the bottom of the page
discussion being page specific vs. wiki wide
function of recent changes as a central place for discussion
recent changes is an aggregation of the wiki, but not a place for communication
IM is there, you can see who else is editing it right now
socialtext has
IRC channels for that
google docs does live chat
combination fo real time talk and editing together
allowing authors to comment/annotate their own edit to explain their thought process
is it good/bad for IM chat logs to be archived?
formality/informality of IM, casual or formal in the discussion?
do you need
relationship – expand people who interact with each other
private messages - somebody sent 4278 messages a day (openspaces0, people were using private messages as chat, usually younger users
user expectations of private messaging vs. IMing – synchronous/asynchronous messaging
how do we encourage structure without losing flexibility/ownership?
chat/IM stretches the social interaction
does that help rope people in? helps brek he ice
admin who's on call who welcomes people immediately
coudl you have live welcoming for people who hit edit?
privacy issue of having someone there watching
wiki means you can edit? wiki is easy to edit and easy to link between pages?
is editing sufficient? why is linking required?
Importance of having name in the
URL
making games of little tasks
wikihow allows any registered user to patrol recent changes
people get really into patrolling
people contribute in lots of different ways
for every bot you could write, there is someone ou there who do it
but bots do increase the quality and focuses efforts on things that really need human work
it'd be fun to run an A/B test to see how to evolve high quality content
wikihow running an experiment in localization
bad content is hard to incrementally improve
smart linking tool is hard to get right
combining a tool with human interaction
