The Evolving Worker

Do you find yourself saying “John is not here today, we’ll have to wait for him to come back from his holidays because no one else knows how to do this” ?

Do you happen to think “I did this last month, how did it work already” ?

If so, these are good signs that starting and maintaining a wiki could bring you good value for the bucks.

In this post, I’ve gathered a couple of advices to help you start and maintain a wiki for your own needs.

Taking care of the newborn wiki eaters

Wikis are fragile creatures, requiring care and love, both at birth and throughout their lives. They can actually fail from the beginning – here are two common patterns:

• death at birth by implementer procrastination : happens when one’s looking for the absolutely most perfect wiki of all times. It’s so easy to spend a lifetime comparing the relative benefits of various wikis implementations. Limit yourself to a couple of hours to choose, pick up one, and start writing ! You will be able to change later, in case your choice becomes not good enough.
• writers big overdose up front : happens if one or two persons are mandated to put all their energies into filling the baby wiki. After a few weeks, they get exhausted, the wiki is not maintained anymore, then starves to death.

How to choose a wiki ? Try first to think about your own expectations and goals. Here are my own expectations today :

• ensure that the wiki is reasonably fast and convenient so that content editing is simple enough for most of the team to contribute without using the Force™.
• check that the search is available and actually works.
• put a reliable backup in place, because this knowledge quickly becomes gold (and that’s a good thing).

Keeping the wiki alive

Here are a couple of principles I found effective to keep my wikis alive :

• instead of having one wiki owner, try hard to develop collective ownership – the wiki is a wealth that belongs to everyone, and everyone should contribute.
• focus on simplicity – only write down the real minimum stuff in a concise fashion; the less is written, the less needs to be maintained.
• trust people – show both technical and non-technical how to write in there, and promote their contributions.

Depending on the teams, these principles can get translated into recipes, such as :

• whenever John realises he is the only person with the knowledge of how to do something specific, he calls someone else (let’s call him Jim)
• together, they carry out the operation and take notes
• Jim writes down how to carry out the operation on the wiki
• later John reads it again to validate

That’s just an example, and use vary from teams to teams.

You’ll probably find out that it’s a lot easier to write down notes as things happen compared to try to remember them later on. Happy wikiing !