WebWise Solutions

If you've ever launched a site only to find that after a few weeks, you and your staff are the only ones visiting it, you should read this new article series by Scott Morris. Here's where you learn how to turn a lackluster site into an online living space where people love to meet. This week the spotlight is on wikis.

Introduction

Raise your hand if you do not like to be successful. No hands, huh? The result I expected. We all like to enjoy success. However, attaining such achievement usually requires at least two things. First, little prosperity has come without hard work. Second, you can work as hard as you want, but without knowing what you are doing, you'll make meager progress. Developing and cultivating online communities is hardly an exception to this concept.

What online presence does my company need besides a website? Apparently, this is a common question, having an abundance of applicable and appropriate answers. To see some of them, we'll take a step back and break it down a little. To start with, I'd like to quantify what we mean by "successful online community." For a super simplified definition, we'll just say that a prosperous online community is one that generates a lot of traffic for your website. Lots of traffic can be turned into revenue by sponsoring advertisers. If we want lots of traffic, we need to have things on the site that are interesting. One online trend that I have seen is that people are very interested in things in which they participate or to which they can contribute.

To put it simply, if you want a successful online community, you need to provide ample ways in which the community members can participate.

How do I get community participation? This is the question that will receive most of my attention throughout this article series. I will outline and explain many different components of an online community. We'll be taking a look at why you would or would not want to consider using them for your website.

Wiki

Named after the Hawaiian word for "quick," a wiki is an online resource for organized information containing HTML and hyperlinks which anyone can edit and modify. These things are everywhere. As an example, go take a look at http://www.wikipedia.org/. They have hundreds of thousands of articles in several different languages.

Why is wiki a good tool to use? Let's consider these points:

• No one person has to "know it all." If one person wants to start writing about a topic, they can create what's called a "stub." They simply write the basics about a particular topic. They then leave the unfinished article. Whoever knows more about that topic can contribute at will. In this way, you have a handful of authors contributing to the development and maintenance of each article.
  
  
• Wikis are a great place for tips, tricks, or other unsupported how-tos which may interest the community. Even though your company doesn't fully support a particular way of doing something, that solution may just make someone's day. If that solution fixes a problem that they are having, they'll want access to it. Because wikis are understood to be community-driven, readers understand that it is not official company doctrine.
  
  
• It is very easy for users to fix errors and problems. In all truth, very little technical expertise is required for editing a wiki page. In almost all cases the only tools that a user needs is a web browser and some ability to write. The author doesn't even need to know HTML. This makes it a great solution for almost any type of website.
  
  
• Little time is required to edit articles. The Hawaiian meaning of the word wiki says it all. They are designed so that the user who wants to make an edit can do so almost instantly, with minimal clicks and thought-time.
  
  
• They are a great location for reference materials. As a location of up-to-date articles, an appropriate application for a wiki is to use it as a place to put reference materials. Things like how-tos and quick-start guides are perfect for use in a wiki.
  
  

What are some caveats to consider when contemplating using a wiki?

• Because anyone can edit pages, it can be difficult to control the growth and direction of the wiki. It would be difficult, for example, to enforce company policies on a wiki, due to the public nature of it. The structure of the wiki is mostly up to the community. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but is something to be aware of.
  
  
• Possible author conflict with respect to the contents of the articles. If one author thinks it should be one way, and another author thinks it should be a different way, possible conflicts could arise. Having a wiki means that problems like this will have to be dealt with as they arise.
  
  
• Though small roll-backs are possible, it is difficult to recover from malicious attacks. When authors post incoherent or incorrect edits, it is simple enough to roll the articles back to a previous state. However, if someone launches a coordinated attack on your wiki with a design to deface it, recovery can be difficult.
  
  

It is quite obvious why wikis are so widely-used. They are a nice resource for organizing and storing information that the community maintains. This, then, becomes one great way to encourage participation and thereby increase both community interest and website traffic for your site.

Conclusion

We have discussed here one component of a successful online community. Benefits of having a wiki are plentiful. They encourage community participation, are a nice place for unsupported yet useful material, and wikis are very simple to edit and maintain. Possible drawbacks are that it may be difficult to control the direction of the content, author conflict, and painstaking recovery from malicious attacks. In the future, I will be providing such analysis on many other components of great communities. In the meantime, consider whether a wiki would be right for you.