Getting developers to use a wiki [closed]

Answer 1

Take a look at the advice at http://www.ikiw.org/ Grow your Wiki

Answer 2

Just to add to some of the excellent advice being offered here...

As a dev in a small company that does largely gov't contract work in the 6-24 month range, I find that my time is often split between development and writing status reports (right up there with writing documentation, only worse!) Having a wiki to slap down unorganized thoughts and notes as we go along has made report-writing a lot less painful (not pain-LESS, but better all the same).

Further, if you're already in the Mediawiki world, you might want to look at SemanticMediawiki. It allows you to take the organization of your data to another level by semantically tagging it. That doesn't mean a lot on its own, I know, but I can tell you (for example) that it can drastically improve the relevance of the data returned from searches. It is definitely worth a look.

Answer 3

Sell the idea of using the wiki to the developers. You've identified some benefits, share those with the developers. If they can see that they'll get something of value out of it they'll start using it.

Example advantages from What Is a Wiki

• Good for writing down quick ideas or longer ones, giving you more time for formal writing and editing.
• Instantly collaborative without emailing documents, keeping the group in sync.
• Accessible from anywhere with a web connection (if you don't mind writing in web-browser text forms).
• Your archive, because every page revision is kept.
• Exciting, immediate, and empowering--everyone has a say.

Answer 4

Generally good advice here. I'd like to add:

1. You really need a champion - someone pushing this to developers and management (without being pushy - that's a challenge!) and providing support & tutorials when possible. This person also needs to be a peer (so a fellow developer, not someone in a remote IT department) and really customer focused i.e. ready to make changes when requested.
2. Speaking of changes, some people here say wikis are unstructured. I disagree. Our MediaWiki installation is structured using categories, particularly with two extensions:WarnNoCategories (to require users to add a category when saving a page) and CategoryTree to show how all the categories fit together (this can be linked to from the sidebar). I've got more tips on how we keep this low threshold, if you're interested.

Answer 5

We've been using a wiki in some form or another for a while now, but it does take a while for people to get on board. You might find that you will be the only one writing articles for some time, but bear with it, other people will come on board eventually.

If someone sends an email around that contains information related to the project then helpfully point them in the direction of the wiki - and keep doing that - they should get the hint.

We have a SharePoint portal and use the wiki from there - we customised it with our own branding so that it "looks the part" - I really feel this has helped to improve the uptake of it.

Make sure that everyone is aware that the wiki is even more informal than email.... because there will be a "fear factor" that people may think anything they add to the wiki will be over-analysed.

Answer 6

Find "sticky" items (sub-3 pg. docs / diagrams / etc) something that the team seems to be creating again and again & post it on the wiki. Make sure everyone has access to the wiki and knows its there - set up a notification mechanism if possible. With some luck, the next time they have to access, rather than dig it out of version control or their machines - they should hit the wiki. If they still don't, try to see if the team has enough slack to actually use the wiki - Subtler issues may lie beneath their reluctance.