Are wikis a waste of time?

If you ask Ziff Davis editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols, they are: "People keep telling me how wonderful wikis are, how they let people work together in new and creative ways, and how they can harness the wisdom of groups. What a bunch of horse manure!" - Well, this was an opinion piece :-).

What is his argument? Vaughan-Nichols puts wikis in the long tradition of collaborative software or groupware like Lotus and contends that they all suffer from the same issue: "The real problem with wikis is the same one that groupware has: it's a wonderful idea that most people never use." I guess the contributors to Wikipedia, the biggest wiki so far, would disagree. The table below shows that Wikipedia had approx. 68,000 contributors in June 2005.

These are only the people who collaborate on this wiki, who actually write the encyclopedia. The numbers get even more impressive when you include those who just read it. In terms of traffic Alexa ranks Wikipedia on # 16 of all websites they monitor! I compared that with the site of the New York Times to give a sense of the level of activity.

Of course, Vaughan-Nichols points out that Wikipedia has to deal with article vandalism and introduced some barriers of entry to improve quality: "[...] at the end of the day, someone does have to manage and edit the information, the workflow, the stories, etc. At this point, wikis become just another workflow tool." No doubt, good rules of engagement are needed to enable quality content on a wiki, but - as I tried to explain in another post - I think we can learn from other open source projects how to establish a functional meritocracy. And the fact that so many people keep coming back to Wikipedia as readers or writers shows that it works well in most cases. They wouldn't if they felt they were wasting their time.

Vaughan-Nichols insists, though: "In my experience, people just don't want to bother with changing their work or workflow habits", and "collaborative work, no matter what the software is behind it, simply doesn't come easily to people." He has lots of experience with groupware, so we should hear his voice, even if he doesn't give examples for wikis that failed for that reason. New workflows call for change management, and in some cases, it might not be worth the effort, because the return is too low. This aspect is worth considering, in particular in corporate environments, but I believe there is a much more important success factor to wikis that can also help to overcome any workflow and change management issues, and that is passion. Nobody helped those thousands of contributors to Wikipedia adopting the new workflow. They were simply keen to make a contribution and learned the tool on the fly. This is where you can feel the power of a wiki. It's not only about the software design, it is about the social dynamic. If you manage to engage with those people who are passionate about a problem, they will look at the wiki as a means of empowerment rather than "just another workflow tool". This is different from a setting where you define a project team of distributed members and then give them a groupware platform to work on. It seems to me that it is key to a wiki that you open it up to people who are passionate about the subject. And in many cases you might have to go beyond the ones you already know. Let's look at an example.

Loic LeMeur, an influential French blogger and General Manager Europe at SixApart, was asked on very short notice to hold a presentation on the European blogosphere at last year's Reboot conference in Copenhagen. He set up the European Blogosphere Wiki and invited European bloggers to contribute. Within 24 hours, he got an impressive overview that provided many surprising insights on the diversity of the European blogosphere. While this certainly wasn't a scientific exercise, it still provided a good indicator of the situation and a very nice piece of market intelligence for LeMeur. After all, he is working for SixApart, a blogging software firm that probably wouldn't have had the resources to create a piece of research like this across 25 countries with 20 languages!

My conclusion is that wikis won't be a waste of time, if you do have the right rules of engagement and create a setting that will engage those people who are passionate about the subject. Then it will more feel like a game played by fans than like a workflow tool that has to be managed. In fact, if you want to get a sense of how online collaboration might look in the future, then read Joi Ito's recent article on World of Warcraft in Wired Magazine. I will close by quoting his closing remarks: "World of Warcraft is millions of people with diverse backgrounds collaborating, socializing, and learning while having fun. What we’re experiencing with this game is similar to the “adhocracy” of many successful open source software projects. It represents the future of real-time collaborative teams and leadership in an always-on, diversity-intensive, real-time environment. World of Warcraft is a glimpse into our future."

Georg Kolb

Technorati tags: wiki, Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Joi Ito, Loic LeMeur

Comments

[Thomas Madsen-Mygdal]

Just a quick fact check.

Loic wasn't asked last minute to do a presentation.

He was busy and first got started on his presentation 1-2 days before - and therefore partly out of laziness took the wiki approach.

But i guess that just makes the story even better.

[Georg Kolb]

Thanks, Thomas, I appreciate your input! Just so you know where I got my impression that Loic was asked on short notice. He posted the following on his blog on June 10th, 2005 http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2005/06/the_european_bl.html: "Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, organizer of Reboot, asked me if I could make a presentation on the european blogosphere tomorrow.
This is quite ambitious, of course I know very well France that has millions of blogs already, I also know some good cases in a few countries, but I would really appreciate if you could help me, so I have put a wiki page up, the european blogosphere." Anyway, whatever the reason for the short notice, it's just a good story, and it was certainly a great idea to have Loic pull this together for your conference.