Why do I believe this?  Examine your own experience with wikis over the past few years.

Think back to when your wiki was new.  Like any fresh creation, your new wiki was all about growth.  Forget organization.  Forget the details.  Just stuff it full of useful info and BOOM!, full-text search nirvana!

And then came the tennis balls…

If you’re like me, you may realize that you spent a lot of time creating new wikis for all kinds of purposes and then abandoned them when they became unwieldy, unfocused, and difficult to maintain.  Here at WebWorks.com, I created or oversaw the development of no fewer than eight wikis.  So I wound up with a lot of great information walled off into 8 distinct systems.  That’s not even including the ones I started on a whim using Google Sites (formerly JotSpot).  I think I used some of those wikis exactly once!

Over time, you realized your wikis are living creatures.  You give them life, help them grow, and then watch as they mature and decline.  Unfortunately, more than once, the wikis you created with such enthusiasm too quickly became graveyards of unused information.

We’ve all tried patching over this issue in different ways.  One approach, taken by TWiki, TWiki’s offspring Foswiki, and MediaWiki, was to add namespace support.  This enabled us to trade those 8 distinct systems for 8 namespaces.  It eased management to somewhat, but personally, I still found myself creating new namespaces because the existing ones had become unwieldy, unfocused, and difficult to maintain.  Another approach involved going to the other extreme: no namespaces, no ownership, no hierarchies.  See Wikipedia for a great example of this method.  It definitely works for Wikipedia.  Yet whenever I’ve tried to apply Wikipedia’s approach to corporate wikis, the experience has been less than successful.

Why is this problem so hard for corporate wikis?

Why does Wikipedia seem to have the problem licked?

Here’s what I think.  First, just like the issue of tennis balls in the server room, having a good wiki boils down to ownership.  Wikipedia is unique in that people feel they own the whole site.  So a flat page organization works well.  Corporate wikis can’t use this approach.  Departments have turf, be it in payroll space, office space, or wiki space.  And departments defend their turf, even in wiki space.  As a business, each department (or individual) is tasked with “proving value“.  A manager who demonstrates provable knowledge contributions by staff increases the perceived value of the department.  This leads to increased budgets, staff promotions, etc.

The conclusion I’ve drawn is that ownership must be preserved in corporate wikis.  Unfortunately, ownership implies hierarchies, namespaces and other barriers to knowledge sharing.  Luckily, a few bright folks (del.icio.us and Flickr) have already tackled this issue with tagging.  Now we’ll be able to organize and share information regardless of who “owns” it and where it is stored.  Finally, to enable our wiki content to be used by the rest of the world, we can take the permalink approach (thanks Blogosphere!) to ensure folks can always find information they come to rely upon.

Here at WebWorks.com, we’ve attacked our middle-aged wikis with a new tool,  the MoinMoin Explorer theme.  The Explorer theme enables wiki users to visual MoinMoin’s version of tagging, MoinMoin categories.  Now, we require internal users to create new wiki pages under their personal name to maintain ownership, say BenAllums, and then share the information with tagging via categories.  Finally, we dedicate an area of the wiki for permalinks titled, Permalinks.

At this point, we’ve rolled out the Explorer + ownership + tagging + permalinks approach internally.  Our documentation wiki has received the Explorer + permalinks treatment and the WebWorks wiki is next in line.  There is much work ahead to leverage these new capabilities.  Yet we’ve already witnessed one rebirth.  Our internal wiki server has regained its former vitality and strength.

You see, back in the day (1994), we were working on creating this great new product to single-source FrameMaker 4.0 files to user-defined, text based outputs.  At the time, I called the project WDT – WebWorks Document Translator.  For some reason or other, our Marketing folks thought WebWorks Publisher would be a better name.  I guess they had a point.

Anyway, to break up the day, one of Quadralay’s founders would take a little time off and play some tennis.  One day, he bought a canister with 3 new tennis balls.  He played his game, came back to the office, and placed that container (now with two good balls left) in our storage room.

That was 1994.

Those tennis balls stayed in the server room until we moved our offices in 1995.

The tennis balls came with us.

We moved again in 1996.

The tennis balls came with us.

We moved a third time around 1997 to our current address on Burnet Road.

The tennis balls came with us.

The tennis balls eventually wound up in our server room.  The “owner” of the tennis balls left the company back in 2004.

The tennis balls stayed.

Until 2008.  I finally tossed them out.  And even then, I had a lurking voice in my head saying, “They aren’t yours to toss.  What are you doing?”

You see, we had lost sight of the two most important principles in business: value and ownership.  Some people use the term “responsiblity”, but that’s not the real issue.  Responsibility is a natural result of ownership.  And value?  That’s easy to assess once you realize value == use.

In 2006, I was placed in charge of Quadralay Development and IT.  And I started asking questions about “the stuff” I was responsible for.  And one day, I decided to change my thinking from  “responsible for stuff” to “owns stuff”.  And everything became crystal clear.

45 monitors, 40 computer shells, 10 UNIX workstations, the original Quadralay SunOS hard drive, our original DNS server machine (15 years old), and the tennis balls left the building.  16 years of collected tidbits which had no business value and no clear owner were gone.

What does any of this have to do with wiki maturation?

Simple.  I’ll bet you’ve got a ton of tennis balls in your wiki right now.  You call them pages.  Do not be fooled by their appearance.  They are tennis balls: fuzzy, yellow covered bits of rubber in plastic tubes.  They have no clear owner and no business value.

I know this because we have a wiki full of tennis balls.  Two wikis in fact.  We’ve been running wikis going back to 2003.  We’ve been working for 6 years to accumulated all this great “stuff”.  Now, we’re ready to do something about it.

Through experience, I learned about the need for clear ownership.  Through experience, I found value can only be assessed through use.  But I didn’t know how to tackle our wiki problem.

That’s where our founder, Tony McDow, comes in.  He found a tool to make our wiki work.  To change it back into the wonderful, useful, whicky-whacky agent of change it once was before we filled it full of tennis balls.  Tony gave us the ability to maintain ownership without sacrificing organizational flexibilty.  And with ownership, value became clear and our tennis balls began to disappear.

Want to find out how he did that?  Well, that’s Tony’s story.  I’ll let him tell it.