Customer Reviews

Wikipatterns

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

Do you need a "wiki" for your organization? Here's the concept: you can harness the vast base of information and lore that exists and use WIKI values to create cooperative groups that get a job done with a minimum of wasted hierarchy and organizational make-work.

The best part of the book, for me, were the ground rules or steps to setting up a Wiki pilot project. As with any project, these are the rules with editorial comments from my point of view:

1. Establish a time frame (all projects need an endpoint)
2. Make it representative (don't make it irrelevant by leaving out a group who then won't see the value of the wiki to them.)
3. Keep it compact (this is a pilot, not a giant undertaking)
4. Choose participants carefully
5. Decide "seek or be sought" Your organization may be more conducive to "push" to participate rather than "pull" by volunteering or curiousity.
6. Wiki with a purpose --this is not an academic exercise.
7. Define house rules: control conduct and content to achieve best participation and results.
8. Personal space: a place for the individual contributors to be reached and reach out
9. Never an Empty Page: if you find a page on Wiki without your desired info, there is a stub or a "this space for rent" template. This encourages people to fill in the blanks.
10. Make it a Magnet: get people in the habit of using it
11. Be firm, think long term --keep marching to your goal

Just this section will show you that the rules will help anyone to get started on a home-grown wiki. This is why I like this book, plenty of guidance and a framework to help you get to your wiki goals, and reasons why you'd want to do that.

The book includes case studies from Johns Hopkins University, interviews with wiki experts and more. A real resource and I think something that can really benefit anyone involved in organizational communications and knowledge base. Impressive. Read it.

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: [...]

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.

Stewart Mader has written a stunning book that explains *and shows* how easy it is to implement a wiki within the organisation.

With clear, easy to read language that doesn't suffer from the typical "North American writer's endless repetition syndrome" (nor does it suffer from Californian hype-mongering), Stewart has written a gem of a book.

Case studies, interviews with the implementers of enterprise wikis, ideas for the selling of wikis into your own company and how to implement a roll-out and get take-up, this book is so refreshing that it's made me rethink my own, personal, one-man-office productivity systems.

It opened my eyes to the many and varied ways that wiki software can be used without others knowing its wiki software driving it -- great, great book!!

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.

My copy of WikiPatterns arrived while I was away for the holidays, so it was a bit of a second Christmas when I arrived back to find that there was a package waiting for me. I couldn't, as much as I tried, remember ordering anything, so I tore the envelope open and there it was: WikiPatterns.

Those who know me know that I am not a huge wiki proponent. I don't talk about them very much and I probably don't give them as much respect as they deserve. They are one of the few Enterprise Social Computing tools to have reall caught on and I admit: I have seen a lot of success inside companies who use them.

So it was in that state of mind that I jumped in and started reading WikiPatterns. If it was going to capture my attention it had to be more than a book about Wikis, it had to take a much broader view of collaboration and social software.

Wikipatterns starts off in the first chapter by recounting one of the stories behind the genesis of the Toyota Manufacturing Process set in 1950, well before there were wikis. Stewart makes a few key points that made me think this book was about more than just wikis

"Instead of giving people a job, and trying to control how they work, it's better to let go: give them the job, and let them figure out the best way to do it. . . The outcome is what matters, not the method. Not only is the end result better, but it's not just a flash in the pan. It's something sustainable. An isn't that what every organization wants?"

The book then dives right in and talks about the elephant in the room: Wikipedia. In the section called "The Wikipedia Factor" Stewart explains the differences between Wikipedia and your own internal company wiki.

Wikipatterns covers almost every component of Enterprise 2.0, from examining the effects on Knowledge Management, fantastic case studies to a guide to running your own pilot programs.

Without rehashing the entire book, I have to say that this one surprised me. This is your first Playbook that will help you break through the frustrations of trying to learn "what do I do next?" when you are eager to bring Enterprise 2.0 tools and strategies to your company.

I'll be handing out copies to friends and clients.

First, this is not a book about wikipatterns. The names of alleged wiki design patterns from a website are bandied about, but there is no discussion here about the patterns, what problems they solve, etc.

Instead, this is a book containing squibs evangelizing the use of wikis (a good thing, in some cases), mixed in with ignorance and misinformation about the presumed(?) competing, inferior forms of online tools such as CMSs.

If you are an experienced wiki user looking for material to convince others to use your wiki, this book may be useful. If you are looking to understand online collaborative tools, the misinformation and ignorance ratio when compared to useful, reliable information is awfully bad. I don't know of a good, general purpose book about online tools. There =are= books about wikis with reasonable info. This is not one of them

The 4th time I read the book was actually today over the course of the last 45 minutes. I'm doing some research for a project I am on and I remembered something from WikiPatterns (the book and site) would help a lot.

The book was written by Stewart Mader a Wiki Evangelist for Atlassian. Talk about combining a writing project with your hobby/job? Nicely done Stewart!

The book itself is hailed as "a practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization" and anyone who has read it will surely agree it's that and a whole lot more. It covers a lot of the basic ideas behind what a Wiki is but it also gives some very practical and sound advice about how to start and grow a wiki! I'm a huge consumer of the [...] which the book has a lot of information found there but the book itself has become a reference manual for me in terms of the brilliant selection of case studies found in it - my favorite is the first one from Leap Frog. Each time I review that case study I am reenergized to continue my own quest for the ultimate "Inbox zero", the way that Leap Frog approached and has begun to utilize their wiki is nothing less of inspirational and is a driving force for me - work related I keep all papers, thoughts, ideas and such in my Wiki personal space and when I have flushed them out I make them public (still within my personal space) I've very rarely documents or such on my system unless I'm forced to, usually because the rest of the project members are simply not comfortable yet with a wiki environment!

I have hope and will continue to help push the concept, armed with my wikipatterns!