What are your best tips for wiki adoption for new users?

At the Message + Medium + Mission Conference in Minnesota, I did an afternoon session using the Social Media Game created by David Wilcox.   One of the techniques I did during the report out of the small groups was throw questions out on Twitter.   There were some fabulous responses.

One group came up with an idea about using a wiki for internal collaboration.  So I asked on Twitter, what is your best wiki adoption tip for internal collaboration?

Here's the responses:

Laura Whitehead suggested reading this article about wiki collaboration and happiness

Ted Fickes (note the dog in the avatar)  I'm trying to use relatively high profile project for wiki-type adoption internally. Or there is prize

Eduardo Jezierski "Build a sense of what to shape the wiki into, a goal, beyond a dumpster. I'd borrow, steal & give credit.

Watford Gap: wiki adoption tip - everyone in the org can share thier stories and buildup a collaborative picture of what they do - any good?

Csuspect: Only send links around via email to wiki pages. i.e. Can you email me the job desc? Sure! Here's the wiki link, edit it there please.

Peter Campbell prep, don't give newbies a blank page; rewrite how-to's in simple format for basic editing/linking.  Wikis aren't intuitive

EricaG Categories & crossreferencing. Otherwise easy to lose track of where you've documented what in an internal wiki

davidLeeking give all staff access, make it easy, say you want their contributions

Seth Schneider Prepopulate the wiki with documents/information that people inherently need to access.

Ericskiff Start by getting line level people to use it one by one. They'll see the utility and it will spread. Slow, but it works!

Kalabird we used google docs wiki-like platform to build our new website's copy decks and implementation plan. start using it and invite others to join. best to start with a project that needs to be accomplished quickly and requires all

bethdunn on the first page, spell everybody's name wrong by just one letter, so they have to go in and fix it.

Greg demos, demos, demos! Once they see how fast you can create a page - they'll be hooked

What is your best tip for wiki adoption in a nonprofit for internal collaboration?

Comments

[Ted]

These are all great suggestions - thanks for re-posting. The main behavior that needs to be "broken" (or overcome or worked into the mix) seems most often to be that staff live in email (Outlook in particular). I have not had a lot of success using wikis internally and have not tried much. We're currently using Central Desktop, including wiki tools, to manage internal and external teams on a large-scale website/communications revamp. I see lots of possibilities for wiki-type approaches to public web content in the organization and am trying to build comfort/familiarity with wikis in general through this and other projects. The MN conference sounds great, btw. Amazing how the twitterage opens it up to folks.