Choosing the Most-Obvious instead of the Best-Suited Wiki
Thomas Vander Wal on the weaknesses of MediaWiki when used in an organization, instead of an enterprise wiki:
The other open source tool that is widely deployed and equally as problematic as Scuttle is MediaWiki. I continually see MediaWiki deployed because it is “what is under Wikipedia”. While that is well and good to get started, MediaWiki falls into the same problems as Scuttle with adoption, scale, lack of the essentials, and missing intelligence engines. MediaWiki requires heavy modifications to work around these problems. One of the problems that is most problematic are those around human social interactions, which nearly every organization I talk with lacks in their resources as they development and design teams that build, implement, and incrementally improve their products.
This is the inherent risk with free tools. People choose them because they seemingly enable work to get started quickly, but this disguises the infrastructure problems that only appear after the tool is made available to a large number of people.
Both of these tool types (social bookmarking and wikis) have great commercial products that provide much better overall adoption opportunities as well as have full-time staff who understand what is needed to get the most value out of what is contributed and how to include the difficult pieces around sociality, which greatly increase adoption and long term use.
If a wiki is going to be used as widely as email, the software’s technical underpinnings need to play well with the rest of the organization’s IT infrastructure, and its capabilities and ease-of-use must be suited to the largest demographic of potential users, not the demographic that’s most highly-skilled and tech-savvy. It needs to be way better than what they’re used to.
Eugene Eric Kim says:
Aug 4th, 2009
I agree with your overall point, but I don’t think it has anything to do with the “inherent problem with free tools.” The problem is what Thomas alludes to. Companies who are choosing software based on what other people are using without consideration of their own unique requirements are asking for trouble, regardless of whether they choose free or proprietary tools.
Stewart Mader says:
Aug 5th, 2009
Eugene,
Because there’s no barrier to entry with free tools, people are much more likely to skip that essential part of the process – defining and considering their own requirements. They’re much more likely to do it when considering a tool they have to pay for, because of the psychology of spending money. Free tools have the advantage that one can start playing with them right away, but that quickly turns to disadvantage if the tool is deployed to a larger audience without taking business and technical requirements into account. It’s not a problem with the tools per se, but it is an inherent risk in using them.