Wikipatterns: Practical Guide to Improve Productivity & Collaboration

Table of Contents

Patterns & Anti-Patterns

  • 90-9-1 – Online participation generally follows a 90-9-1 ratio of readers to contributors
  • Acknowledge – Empower peer recognition and encourage its use
  • Ambassador – Person who helps adoption through their endorsement and consistent promotion
  • BarnRaising – Designated time to build structure, seed content, and set norms
  • BlankPage – Seed new pages with structure or content to guide others
  • Bully – Someone who goes too far in pushing people to use the wiki
  • Champion – Provides guidance, reduces obstacles, and is essential to the success of adoption
  • Charter – Guidelines for collaboration should be created at the start of technology adoption
  • FAQ – Scaffold that enables a group to build information and share answers
  • Gnome – Performs small edits on a wiki to continually improve its overall quality
  • IntentionalError – Make some mistakes for others to find and fix, thus getting them used to editing
  • Invitation – Good way to encourage non-early adopters to get involved
  • Magnet – Entice people to visit the wiki by exclusively posting essential information
  • Patron – Leader who confers legitimacy that can increase the likelihood of success
  • Sandbox – “Practice” page that may inadvertently hinder adoption
  • Scaffold – Give people a place to start by “framing” the content that should be added to a new page
  • Spectator – Someone who consumes wiki content but does not contribute to it
  • Troll – Provokes the community instead of focusing criticism on specific procedural or functional issues
  • Viral – Use spreads as people encourage colleagues to use the wiki

Wikipatterns offers practical, proven advice for guiding adoption of new technology, featuring case studies from Apple, Johns Hopkins, LeapFrog, and the nonpartisan National Constitution Center. Drawing from A Pattern Language, the architecture and urban design book by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, Wikipatterns enables you to build an enduring, useful space for collaboration, whether your team is nearby or spread around the world. Reviews | Order a Copy

Clear explanations from an author sympathetic to the confusion and sometimes plain fear that is associated with actively changing any group’s collaborative culture.

Wiki originator Ward Cunningham – from the Foreword to Wikipatterns

I love it when this happens, a blog I’ve read for ages (devoured some would say) gets published in book format. Needless to say my copy is already ordered.”

Gordon McLean

There’s not many humans on the planet that know more about wikis than Stewart Mader. Wherever folks are talking about wiki technology, you’ll find Mader, explaining how wikis work, how to get folks to use them, how to govern them, and how to use them to solve various real-world challenges.

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

Stewart articulates the benefits of collaboration clearly and comprehensively. He’s the voice of experience.

Audience Member – Stanford Tech Briefing

Presentations & Media

“Grazie!” I said to Renato Geremicca (right) for inviting me to keynote the international Forum Risorse Umane conference in Milan, where I shared how I led the global digital transformation at Fitch Ratings.
Social Media for Your International Meeting, 2012 – Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) Annual Conference
The Community Roundtable Quick Chat: Technology Pilots, 2009 – Rachel Happe and Stewart Mader explore how internal workflows are evolving, the changing definition of “content ownership”, and why companies should consider removing the term “pilot” from their social media and community initiatives.
Your Wiki Isn’t Wikipedia: Practical Ways to Use it in Teaching, Research and Administration, 2009 – Sacred Heart University
21 Days of Wiki Adoption, 2008 – While at Atlassian, I developed a video series to help organizations introduce new technology tools that improve productivity, and increase collaboration