This article is from Michael Idinopulos, Vice-President, Professional Services and Customer Success at Socialtext:

I often hear from wiki champions inside organizations that “It’s hard to get people to use wikis”. There’s something right about that comment, but also something wrong. I’ll explain why.

Wikis can be used for many different activities, which fall into two broad categories:

1. In-the-Flow wikis enable people do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual team rooms, and project management systems.
2. Above-the-Flow wikis invite users to step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do. These wikis are typically replacing knowledge management systems (or creating knowledge management systems for the first time).

When wiki champions complain that it’s hard to get people to use wikis, they’re usually thinking of above-the-flow wikis. Modeled on Wikipedia, these wikis typically aspire to capture knowledge and insights that people collect in the course of their work. That’s a hard thing to get people to do.

But the challenge of getting people to use above-the-flow wikis is an above-the-flow thing, not a wiki thing. Left to their own devices, people don’t collaborate very much in above-the-flow ways. That was one of the great (if depressing) learnings of the Knowledge Management movement.

Above-the-flow wikis are used lightly (when at all) by large groups of people. Many are encouraged to participate, but participating is rarely an urgent or critical-path activity. Lurking is extremely common, and the bulk of content comes from <5% of users who are either personally invested in the success of the project or just love to publish. Wikipedia works because of the law of large numbers: A small percentage of a huge number is still a large number.

Adoption of in-the-flow wikis looks very different. It’s not at all hard to get people to use in-the-flow wikis. They are used intensively by relatively small, well-defined groups of people: a project team, a business unit, etc. Once the group (or the group’s manager) decides to use wikis as the primary collaboration tool, adoption is quite easy: People use it because that’s the way to do their work. Lurkers are rare, since most people have a steady stream of things to contribute to the rest of the group.

The real challenge of in-the-flow wikis is that they tend not be very viral. Many of us cherish, perhaps naively, the view that Enterprise 2.0 tools expand virally. It’s like the shampoo commercial (starring a young and then-unknown Heather Locklear): And she told two friends. And so on. And so on. That may be the way Wikipedia grew, but it doesn’t work for in-the-flow wikis inside companies. Adoption of in-the-flow wikis cleaves to business processes and organizational units. If the guys in the mailroom use a wiki to track packages, and you don’t work in the mailroom, you’re not going to join that wiki. Virality ends where workflow ends.

This is not an either/or decision. To bring wikis into an organization, it helps to have both kinds of wikis. Above-the-flow wikis are good at generating broad awareness across the organization. They expose newcomers to the tool. Some percentage of those newcomers will try it, grasp the power of the tools, and find new sources of value in them. In-the-flow wikis are good at generating deep value within narrow pockets of the organization. Above-the-flow provides breadth, in-the-flow provides depth. Launch both kinds, and you just might make a splash.