Wiki without the pedia

While tagging my previous post, I noticed that I had tags for both "Wikipedia" and "wiki". There are four articles (now five, of course) tagged "wiki," three of which are more or less to do with Wikipedia. The other is from the Baker's Dozen series, speculating about what role the wiki approach may play in the next generation of search engines.

What really stands out to me about wikis is that there's Wikipedia and then there's everything else.

Everybody's heard of Wikipedia by now and quite a few people have tried their hand at editing it. As a result, there is a well-known tool for editing Wikipedia (Mediawiki) along with a well-established culture and etiquette. There is also enough of a critical mass that, for the most part, articles tend to improve over time.

And then there's everything else. Don't get me wrong. There are some good wikis out there. But there are also an awful lot of half-baked ones. These tend to crop up when a small software shop or similar organization decides that it needs a wiki to, say, document its software architecture and development process. Well, why not? Wikipedia is pretty successful, and software shops are always looking for lightweight, dare I say "agile" ways of tracking what's going on.

In practice, there are several pitfalls:

• Wikipedia has a lot of eyes. According to Wikipedia, Wal-Mart has about 2 million employees, while Wikipedia has close to 13 million registered users. Granted, Wikipedia claims only about 90,000 "active contributors", but that's still about the same headcount as Microsoft. Chances are, your company isn't that big*
• It used to be every computer science undergrad wanted to invent and implement a programming language. Somewhere around the turn of the century that ambition seems to have shifted to writing a wiki engine (which typically has at least a toy programming language in it somewhere). So many to choose from and, even though approximately one of the choices has a huge userbase and all that goes with it, the odds are that whoever set up your wiki chose something "better" than Mediawiki.
• Wikis were designed for quickly throwing together webs of loosely structured text, and not for any of several other things they sometimes get used for. A wiki page generally doesn't know what role it has in a bigger picture. A wiki is not a bug tracker. It is not a release planning system. It doesn't know that feature X was promised to FooCorp for release 2.1 whose schedule has just slipped. No one told it any of that. Ah, but that's where the toy programming language comes in ...
• Many shops are content to limit wikis to the smaller role of gathering together bits of wisdom that people tend to email each other as the occasion demands. "Why did you design it this way?" "Well ..." The problem is that this conversation tends to happen when, for any of myriad reasons, the design wasn't documented close to the code, so someone is now asking the author. Ideally, the original designer goes and documents the code and replies with a link to the new doc. Alternatively, if the conversation is taking place on an archived list, the answer will be in the archives for future generations. In either case, it's not clear that updating a wiki and replying with a link to that would be an improvement.
• Wikis need gardening to combat various forms of rot. Typically there's even less time for this, particularly in a small shop, than there is for updating the wiki in the first place.

Wiki writing is not magically easier than any other kind of writing. Maintaining a wiki takes time and dedication. Wikipedia has a lot of dedicated contributors, including many who specialize in gardening and other less glamorous jobs. If your organization is not specifically in the business of producing wiki pages, chances are the wiki will reflect that.

* On the other hand, chances are you wiki is not going to be as big as Wikipedia. Nonetheless, (I claim) there are economies of scale that happen when the user base gets larger.  In a large community people can specialize, for example in maintenance tasks.

[Wikipedia continues to dominate the world of Wiki, even neglecting its sister projects.  The one notable exception I can think of is TV Tropes.  I doubt it has anywhere near the readership of Wikipedia, but it's still the rare example of a publicly-edited non-Wikipedia wiki with a significant readership -- D.H. Dec 2015]