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Wikis – Knowledge Source or Sink?

Posted on January 4, 2009
Filed Under knowledge | 2 Comments

Back in 1993, I spent 60 glorious days travelling around the US on the Delta Pass. For 400 GBP, Delta Airlines gifted you a return flight from LHR, London to JFK, New York AND for 60 days free travel on any of its domestic flights. And with the 2 dollars to the pound, it was the best airline ticket I’ve ever bought (flying from east to west coast was free bed and breakfast…).

It was during this time that I stumbled across the Roach Motel. For cockroach infestations, get the roach motel (it was actually a mini-hotel with poison in it), place it in the middle of the room, and overnight the roaches entered two-by-two. Nice!

Roaches check in — but they don’t check out!

This is exactly what happens to knowledge (documents) when you just add stuff without thinking about the 1) target audience and 2) how they are going to find and take value from the knowledge you’ve supposedly just contributed. Wikis can quickly become central to everything you do, holding critical information about the company, the projects you participate in, and the people you work with. But when you start hearing things like:

• Where should I put this document?
• I don’t put things in the wiki because I’ll never find them again!
• Damn, this wiki is just too big

You’re wiki is breaking.

Worst still, I was in a meeting when Bill said to Ted, “What’s our expense policy?” It’s in the wiki Ted responds, slightly miffed for having to say the words, it’s in the wiki. Bill sighs, “I knew you were going to say that, going in…”. That little exchange confirmed it for me, the wiki and/or or it usage was well and truly broken.

So fix it!

Well, it’s not that simple. But before we address that let’s agree on the problem first. There are two key types of knowledge: tacit and explicit. Tacit knowledge is know-how that typically resides in the minds of the few, the experts. Explicit knowledge is know-what and is the scaffolding upon which to hang tacit knowledge. Both are critical but tacit knowledge is the one that tends to leave your company when people resign, go on holiday, move projects, change job role, and so on. Wikis are a means to capture, store and make accessible tacit knowledge. Wikis are all about knowledge transfer.

However, I’ve found that only a few people invest in wikis. Assuming everyone in the wiki is withholding tacit knowledge, an unbalanced wiki is one where the number of leeches (consumers) vastly outnumber the seeders (producers). But this is preferably over a broken wiki that is awash with partial seeders. A partial seeder is even worse than a leech because they actively damage the knowledge space but think that they are enhancing it. Here are some of the characteristics of a partial seeder:

• Come back later: Create an empty page as a placeholder and six months later its still empty.
• Random page naming: A Study to Determine Site Performance – the resulting URLs for page names like this can be is ugly and non-intuitive.
• Lack of Formatting: Create pages that are pure text without using the available wiki text formatting.
• Crappy content: Because its not a Word document, because I’m in a hurry, because its a wiki, because there is not review process, no need to think. Let’s write crap and go!,
• No pictures: I can’t tell you how many times a good picture, on a page, would have saved me many valuable minutes/hours.
• No text: A picture is a thousands words, I get it. But few words to annotate a picture would be nice, to set the scene. Again, another symptom of crappy content and my time is more important that yours.
• And the list goes on…. (love to hear some of yours…)

Value your audience

If I write something for someone else’s benefit, I tend to invest at least 5 minutes of my time (writing) for every minute of your (reading). So if 5 people read a 1 minute article, I break even. Anymore, I’m adding significant value, particularly if those readers are customers, employees and/or work colleagues. Consider the reverse scenario. I invest 1 minute of my time to write a document that takes every reader 5 minutes to decipher. The more people that read it, collectively the more of time I’ll have wasted of theirs. For internal company communication, that’s not good. An extra 2 minutes putting in a picture in place, another minute refining the content and finally a minute to format the text, well, waste very quickly becomes value. Let’s do the maths. In terms of company time, if that document targetted 40 people, you just gone from 200 minutes (40×5) to 40 minutes (40×1) of reading by investing an additional 4 minutes of your time writing.

Are you a partial seeder?

I think we are all prone to be partial seeders. The trick is to stop yourself. Don’t push crappy content into the wiki. Report crappy content back to author and get them to fix it up if its that bad, or tweak it yourself if its a simple fix. Just because it’s easy to add content to the wiki, doesn’t mean it has to be crappy. Otherwise, the wiki quickly moves from being a knowledge source to a knowledge sink. At that point, it would be better just to switch it off rather than continue on regardless.

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