Wiki Content Is Not Sacred, and That’s OK

This is from Matt Wiseley of EditMe. Check out their hosted wiki for group collaboration, knowledge sharing and content management, small business web sites, and more. EditMe also offers affordable professional services to customize your wiki. – Stewart

As with any new technology or process, there will be resistance to change. But unlike many organizational changes involving technology, wikis move away from central control rather than toward it. Employees often view IT as a controlling mechanism within the organization, and the procedures and policies involved in using technology at work are typically enforced with strict physical constraints. With traditional content and knowledge management systems, if you shouldn’t edit something, you probably can’t.

These policies, in concert with the read-only web and media outlets that most people are used to, have given a sort of sacredness to published content. There’s an assumption that if it’s published on the web then it must be correct, and if its not there should be grave consequences. While this is a reasonable expectation for professional media outlets and even a company’s public web site, it doesn’t fly when it comes to wikis, and organizational understanding of this idea is important to wiki adoption.

The media’s repeated accounts of Wikipedia’s supposed “embarrassment” over errors on the site are evidence of, and work to keep alive, the notion that web content in all forms is sacred. Different wikis have different means of providing accountability. With Wikipedia, it’s a strong focus on citation of sources. If you read that Bruce Springsteen “kinda sucks” and no sources are cited, you can safely ignore it as the tomfoolery it clearly is.

In an organization, accountability is usually in the form of peer review and user identification. If Mary in HR posts the holiday calendar on the wiki and accidentally includes President’s Day when it’s not a company holiday, someone is likely to notice and point this out. In any case, Mary’s name is attached to the content and everybody knows it was an innocent error.

What’s important here is the shift in perspective away from holding content sacred, away from controls so tight they limit contribution, and towards an organizationally supported openness and acceptance of fallibility. In the case of Mary’s incorrect holiday content, there could be two reactions. Management could send a company wide email acknowledging and apologizing for the error. The wiki naysayers will latch onto this as evidence that the wiki should go and everyone will live in fear of being called out for making a mistake on the wiki. Alternatively, the error can simply be fixed. It’s the responsibility of management to deliberately make light of this kind of error and then move on.

The idea that an organizational wiki is a safe place for employees to contribute is key to its success. Though the wiki is hosted and viewed in a browser, employees need to understand that it’s open nature means that its content isn’t always gospel and that incorrect, incomplete or misleading content should simply be edited when found – not made into a federal case. The furrowed brows should be saved for the employee who runs to management to report an error instead of clicking Edit and fixing it.

Wiki use calls for a simple trade-off of control for content, perfection for timeliness. The more the members of an organization can contribute freely, the more contribution will happen. In return, employees will feel safe contributing, and the wiki will be more likely to serve its purpose.