Wiki gardening
From WhyNotWiki
WikiGnome (http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/WikiGnome).
What is it?A WikiGnome is a person who performs small edits on a wiki to continually improve its overall quality .
(A WikiGnome is also often known as a WikiGardener)
WikiGnomes are important to the success of a wiki because their edits increase the value of everyone else's content, such as:
- Cosmetic editing to keep the wiki from being overrun with "weeds" (typos, misspellings, poorly structured sentences and paragraphs)
- Add or fix links to make sure relevant content is navigable within the wiki
- Improve the flow and clarity of content improve the readability of the page
- Setting an example for other users of how and when to use the wiki
Usage
WikiGnomes tend to be self-selecting. They're people who care about attention to detail, are offended by messiness and will make the small edits that are required to continually improve the quality of your wiki.
So if you can't select them, how do you increase gnome-like behaviour?
- When you see someone making a small, cosmetic improvement edit - encourage them.
- If someone emails you to tell you about a small mistake - show them how to fix it themselves.
- Make sure that your wiki makes it obvious how to edit a page.
- Ensure that your people understand there are no barriers to anyone editing (improving) any page. (exemplified by wikipedia's "Be Bold" mantra)
Wiki Gardening (http://nothing.tmtm.com/archives/2593) (2007-01-16). [See Wiki searching]
...It wouldn’t matter how great a search appliance we had, normal search just wouldn’t help here. This is where, as Chris points out, the process of wiki gardening comes in. Someone needs to tend to the wiki, carefully pruning back the less relevant information, and reshaping each page into its most useful form.
But this is a time consuming operation, and generally most people don’t have that sort of time. It’s hard enough trying to ensure that a summary of the key facts from each customer interaction just get copied over onto their wiki page, without also needing to spend another five minutes just tidying that page up. In larger organisations where call-centre staff are measured on how many queries they can handle per hour, the disincentive is much much stronger.
...
Liz Henry (Jan 24). http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?chris_dent_2007_01_15.
Having various ways and tools to help the gardener spot the weeds, and batch edit them, would be very cool. For example, having a tool to find incipient links is useful, but then what do you want to do with them? A spreadsheet-like view, or one like iTunes, sortable in different ways, with fields that can be filled in for some or all of the weedy incipient links, batch tagging, deleting, or adding of crosslinks...
gardening this wiki (http://www.socialtext.net/exchange/index.cgi?gardening_this_wiki).
Here are some things we can do to maintain, structure, and garden this wiki.
Contents
[edit] Expose information
Make it possible to discover relevant information in many ways. Tag, categorize, add links. Create pages with lists and organizational structures. It's okay to have more than one structure to describe the information in a wiki.
Add tags to pages as you read them. As we all do this, patterns will become apparent and we can reorganize the wiki's structure to reflect common use patterns.
The current gardening effort includes the creation of a navigation bar for the top of wiki pages. Its top categories of information will help to create wiki structure.
[edit] Interlink
Increase the interlinkedness and tightness of the wiki.
Reduce orphaned pages. Look at the list of orphaned pages, and link up a few orphans. [...]
Use search to knit pages more tightly together. If you create a page, do a quick search for key words that might get you related pages, and add links to your page. For example, in creating a page called orphans, search the wiki for that word. Make that word a link in pages where it seems relevant to do so.
[edit] Create structure
With the wiki structure and tagsonomy pages, the contents of this wiki will become more clear. We'll also make it easier and more inviting for users to add new content.
Free growth outside of this structure can still happen. Users aren't constrained by structures and can create new ones.
[edit] Add new information
Write something new. You never know who else might find it useful.
Add yourself. Add your name to the list of people on this wiki. Make a page for yourself and tag it "people". When people link to your name, you will see it in the backlinks to this people page. Rather than linking directly out to your web site, link your name to a people page. Then the information will be useable and visible through the wiki's structure!
[edit] Deleting, pruning, rewriting or refactoring
We can prune away information that is no longer relevant. However, pruning may have harmful effects. For example, if a person joins the wiki and makes a test page, and others delete that page: 1) it may confuse the original user 2) it erases that user's tracks on the wiki. For now, I would like instead to preserve tracks, by tagging test pages or sandboxes "test page". (See the discussion at weeding the collection.)
For some pages, the information they contain could be better exposed by moving that information into existing pages. It is okay for that moving to be clumsy at first -- i.e. a chunk of information left in a comment or put at the end of a page, marked clearly as something that needs to be reintegrated later.
We can use a "needswork" tag to mark such pages, or "gardenthis". Remember to delete that tag if you work on the page and resolve the issue.
[edit] Rename pages
It's good for page names to be short and resuable. Ask yourself: How would other people logically link to this idea? Name a page accordingly. Imagine its title used in a sentence.
Rename pages according to that principle. When you rename a page, a redirect is left in its old place. You might want to follow the backlinks from that old page, change their links to reflect the new name, and then delete the old page.
...
