Wikipatterns [Paperback]

Stewart Mader (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 10, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0470223626 | ISBN-13: 978-0470223628 | Edition: 1

• This book provides practical, proven advice for encouraging adoption of your wiki project and growing it into a useful collaboration tool or vibrant online community
• Gives wiki users a toolbox of thriving wiki patterns, which enable newcomers to avoid making common mistakes or fumbling around for the solutions to the same problems as their predecessors
• Explains the major stages of wiki adoption and explores patterns that apply to each stage
• Presents concrete, proven examples of techniques that have helped people grow vibrant collaborative communities and change the way they work for the better
• Reviews the overall process, including setting up initial content, encouraging people to contribute, dealing with disruptive elements, fixing typos and broken links, making sure pages are in their correct categories, and more

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Plant and Grow a Successful Wiki.

A combination of a web page and a Word document, a wiki is a tool that's simple like email but powerful enough to reduce your cluttered inbox and busy meeting schedule. Wikipatterns will help you learn how to build a 21st-century tool for collaboration, whether your team is in the same office or split among offices around the world. Wikis can transform business collaboration, and you'll learn the ins and outs of making the most of this enduring collaboration tool. This book answers questions like:

• What is a wiki?
• How does an organization's wiki differ from Wikipedia?
• How do I make a case for using a wiki?
• What's the best way to get started?
• How do wikis change an organization's culture?
• How do wikis "fit" with other collaboration tools?
• What are the patterns of use and behavior that positively and negatively affect the wiki?
• How do I encourage participation and make the wiki "stick" as an idea and a tool?

About wikipatterns.com
Wikipatterns.com is a toolbox of ideas and strategies for anyone looking to build a successful wiki. It's also a wiki, which means you can help build the information based on your experiences!

About the Author

Stewart Mader is Wiki Evangelist for Atlassian Software Systems, makers of the award-winning and widely used Confluence wiki software. Stewart has worked with business, academic, and non-profit organizations to grow vibrant collaborative communities. He also publishes Blog on Wiki Patterns (www.ikiw.org), and recently wrote an online book on how the wiki is transforming education and research.

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (December 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470223626
• ISBN-13: 978-0470223628
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 0.5 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #837,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Since 1999, Stewart Mader has helped organizations around the world harness the immense potential of the Web to connect people with engaging, valuable, and timely information. He has led the design and development of digital and social media programs including: Twitter strategy (organic and promoted), Communities of Practice content hubs and Enterprising Investor blog for CFA Institute, SAP Community Network content strategy for SAP, Wikipatterns.com and corporate blogs/word-of-mouth marketing for Atlassian Software. His team at Brown University was selected by Apple to lead one of the first six large-scale pilot tests of iTunes U to deliver learning materials to iOS devices. He is the author of two books: Wikipatterns (Wiley, 2008) and Using Wiki in Education (Lulu Press, 2006), and two documentary films: Skysight (2005) and Seeing the Scientific Light (2002).

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for leading the way to wiki adoption in the workplace... January 11, 2008

By Thomas Duff HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Wikis are one of those "Web 2.0" applications that seem to be right on the edge of jumping into mainstream adoption. If your workplace is anything like mine, you've been spending more time lately answering the "what's a wiki" question than you have in the past. If you're starting to approach the point where you're ready to try one out in your organization, here's a good place to start your planning... WikiPatterns - A Practical Guide To Improving Productivity and Collaboration In Your Organization by Stewart Mader. Rather than a "do this, this, and this" instruction manual, Mader gets into the whys and whats of wiki adoption in the workplace, complete with case studies and real-life examples.

Table of Contents:
1. Grassroots is Best
Case Study: LeapFrog
2. Your Wiki Isn't (Necessarily) Wikipedia
Case Study: Johns Hopkins University
3. What's Five Minutes Really Worth?
Case Study: Sun Microsystems
4. 11 Steps to a Successful Wiki Pilot
Case Study: Red Ant
Case Study: A Conversation with a WikiChampion: Jude Higdon
5. Drive Large-Scale Adoption
Case Study: JavaPolis
Case Study: A Conversation with a WikiChampion: Jeff Calado
6. Prevent (or Minimize) Obstacles
Case Study: Kerrydale Street
7. Inspirational Bull****
Case Study: Constitution Day
Case Study: Peter Higgs: Using a Wiki in Research
Appendix - Questions and Answers
Index

Stewart Mader is the Wiki Evangelist for Atlassian Software, who also happens to be the creator of Confluence, an enterprise Wiki software package. But don't let that little bit of disclosure put you off. He is a well-known personality in the wiki community, and he's done the evangelism gig with many a company and organization prior to joining Atlassian.... As such, the material is pretty vendor-neutral in terms of what you should and shouldn't be doing. You don't have to worry about sitting through a long sales pitch.

The book is designed to be used in conjunction with the website [...]. That site lists and explores a number of "patterns" and "anti-patterns" that come into play when launching and running a wiki site. Furthermore, it's split up into people and adoption issues. So as you're reading through the book, you'll see references (especially in the case studies) to patterns and anti-patterns that influenced the successes and difficulties of many of the projects. As the wikipatterns concepts are still evolving, the case studies didn't necessarily set out to follow and implement a certain set of behaviors. Quite often, the patterns are seen only in hindsight. But you have the benefit of being able to observe the patterns at work before you get started on your own project. This should help increase your odds of success at the start, or at least give you a clue as to what might be going wrong before it gets too messy to correct.

I personally am at the point where this information is *exactly* what I need at work. We've got a number of people who are ready to start a wiki pilot project, and the only reason I've put it off is due to some other higher-priority projects. But armed with Mader's wisdom, I think I'll have a much better chance of pulling off a successful pilot. I also saw some great ideas for taking the DominoWiki OpenNTF project and extending it (like with page templates) to make the software even more useful and easy to implement.

If you simply want to roll out a wiki for your own use, you'll probably see most of this information as overkill. But if you want to help lead the way to wiki adoption at your company, you could consider this the "teacher's guide" edition of the textbook. Not only will it ground you in the cultural aspects of wiki adoption, but it will establish you as the "go-to" person when it comes to this particular branch of the collaboration software tree. Read more ›

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What WikiPatterns Is and Is Not December 29, 2007

By T. Reginald Solomon

Format:Paperback

Wikipatterns is the best practical guide to understanding how to harness the potential powerful and transformative effects of a wiki that I have come across in paper-print or via web.

If you're looking for a techno-speak on the mechanics of physically setting up a wiki (i.e., coding, servers, etc), this book is not for you (I'm not a "tech" guy). If you're looking for a guide that outlays why one would want to create a wiki, the benefits to be gained by one, how to invest and rally your organization to supporting wiki, and case studies from organizations and companies that have done it - this is book if for you.

I'm in the process of setting up a wiki and this book helped me anticipate potential adoption challenges, and build my site to account for those. The advice this book gives on how to roll out a wiki, including how to reach out to and manage the participation of early adopters is very much worth reading. I read this book in one sitting.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Better Online September 4, 2008

By Walter E. Hopton

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

It's far from an exciting book (it was great for helping me fall asleep at night), but it has valuable content. You can actually get the whole book online, since it was, naturally, written on a wiki -- in fact, you can contribute to the wiki. I recommend the website/wiki as a resource for all of involved with community management and wikis: [...]

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The perfect summary of what a wiki is and how to make them work. March 24, 2008

By Stuart French

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

If you are a manager, IT guru, HR thought leader or even CEO and want to know what a wiki is and how they can be used to increase collaboration and reduce inefficiencies in your organisation, this is the book for you.

There are plenty of texts, magazine articles and web-sites that will show you different aspects of wikis. Many are based on the success and principles behind Wikipedia, but most lack a proper viewpoint for corporate wiki use. Using a wiki in a corporation is not the same as building a public encyclopedia. This book covers the similaries and the differences before diving into exactly how corporate wikis work, with plenty of case studies and Stewart's hand's on knowledge to back it up.

Also included is the acknowledgement that a wiki is as much a social implementation as it is a technical one and the benefits it brings to collaboration are far beyond it's use as a simple content management system.

The author has done a reasonable job generalising the techniques and advice away from the Atlassian Confluence software he is used to championing, which makes it a good resource no matter what technology your choose. However if I have a complaint, it would simply be as a Confluence user myself, being left a little hungry for how some of the techniques are actually applied in the real world.

Highly recommended.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Okay, for what it is June 13, 2008

By Justin

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm disappointed. This book lacked the substance and depth that I expected. I was very excited to receive it, as I've been looking for a good book that details the hows and whys of the wiki, but I looked through it once and haven't picked it up since. Its geared toward business use and the different kinds of users one will encounter when trying to set up an internal business wiki, but it doesn't get as much into the hows as would like, beyond surface ideas of how to encourage participation.

A much more challenging book would be a discussion of those things in regard to public wikis -- it's a very different scenario when someone at work has to use the company wiki, versus an internet user who does so for pleasure or fun.

Also, the production run is shoddy -- the paper inside the book is very thin, the print half-tones are extremely rough and the cover is of poor quality.