Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia and Enterprise Wikis
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Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, spoke this morning at our Enterprise Solutions Summit. This was the second time I was hearing him speak and as usual, he did a phenomenal job. He covered Wikipedia, Wikia and the wiki potential within the enterprise. He mentioned the Wikipedia search project but was a little coy on that. Here are some of the topics he covered and how they can apply to the enterprise. |
a. $100,000 was spent on Wikipedia last year. Too little? This year roughly 2 million dollars will be spent because there are some system upgrades being conducted as well. Otherwise, the number would have been around the same this year too. Here’s a question, how much are you spending on your intranet? What about your own wiki initiative? Did it cost you less than $100,000? That’s the challenge for your next intranet initiative. Can you make installing and running it cheaper than your traditional intranet?
b. You need to have a social contract with your employees. Wikipedia has an informal social contract with its users. Their contract begins with putting the users at the center of every major decision. They put the needs of the authoring community first. If you establish a wiki based intranet, you need to think about your social contract. What type of relationship will you have with your employees? How will you communicate that? How can you guarantee that you won’t break the contract?
c. Remember to respect your communities. Certain Wikipedia concepts apply just as much within the intranet domain too. These include needing to understand the motives of your users and aligning your goals with theirs. Encouraging the early adopters and influencers to take control of the solution. Let them have an active voice. Web interfaces can have commercial and non commercial spaces on them just like in real life. However, don’t confuse them. For example, it would be strange to be selling cars in a church. The same philosophy applies to your intranet. Some parts of it can be more business oriented than others.
d. Don’t design your restaurant based on what worries you. Jimmy Wales shared an interesting anecdote with us about restaurant design. He said that given a choice, when designing restaurants, we’d really get worried about people killing each other with knives and therefore we would design cages for each guest in the restaurants. However, improbable that may sound, the point he made is important. When designing internal solutions, we worry so much about all the bad things that may happen that we design for failure versus for success. Trust your communities first.
e. Use basic rules to determine what should be on your enterprise wiki. Sitting in the audience, Andrew McAfee asked how one decides what should be on Wikipedia and what shouldn’t. The root of his question was the Enterprise 2.0 debate that raged for a while on Wikipedia. The response - two key philosophies guide whether something is published on Wikipedia. Uniqueness and Verifiability. If the subject can’t be verified by another authoritative source, it cannot sit on Wikipedia. Secondly, the subject needs to be unique in some way. For example, a page about a random glass sitting on a table will be deleted. There is nothing unique about it.
Within your enterprise wiki, something to consider is what guidelines should you put in place for article creation? Under what circumstances should you remove something? Who should be allowed to remove items? The broader community or a small advisory group?
