Managing Corporate Wikis - to QA or not to QA

That is truly the question. Should I, as a manager of a corporate wiki, develop and implement a Quality Assurance (QA) process when users submit content for publishing? A corporate or in-house wiki is not the same as a public wiki such as Wikipedia and more can be done to make the content effective.

For example, Wikipedia's authors (everyone) do not have access to the base file structure. In a corporate wiki, if you allow users the ability to create pages at will, the base file structure may be vulnerable to accidental deletion. Should you implement file backup procedures? Should there be a publishing staging area where content sits while it is being reviewed and approved thereby creating a possible automatic backup and restore point?

Wikipedia does not provide templates for authors. In a corporate wiki environment, the authors can be guided to templates that already support corporate guidelines like headers, footers, typeface, body length, and special sections including "see also" and "for more information, contact x." A template can make the page creation process much smoother for the corporate employee who is just trying to publish content quickly and does not have time to research and apply the guidelines.
Quality Assurance exists to make sure content meets guidelines whatever those guidelines might be. Suppose you don't want duplicate content to exist on your corporate wiki or you want to make sure content is easy to find by the intended audience. One way to weed out duplicate content is to avoid publishing it in the first place. The QA governing body could review proposed content, determine the subject matter, then search the wiki to see if such subject matter exists already. If the content is exactly the same, the proposed content is not published. Likewise the QA governing body could add metatags or identify which keywords an audience is likely to use when searching for a particular piece of content and then make sure the search function first looks for keywords before executing a full-text search.

What guidelines are you most likely to want to enforce with a QA process? It is entirely up to your unique organization, the type of content being submitted, the authors, viewers, and corporate policy. Perhaps the best QA is to leave it up to the viewers. That is, open up the pages to everyone in read/write mode. When a viewer recognizes outdated, incorrect, or inconsistent content, it is up to that person to make the correction.

2004 Article About Corporate Wikis

Using Wikis in a Corporate Context
Dr. Espen Andersen
November 10, 2004
(draft)

Dr. Andersen "investigates the technology of Wikis" and says that a wiki is not just a platform for creating content quickly, it is also a way to "manage knowledge creation through evolution of norms and values rather than directives and incentives."

This article deserves further review because this is the first article I have encountered that focuses on (a) the corporate context wiki and (b) management of knowledge.

Dr. Andersen's point about a wiki being a non-traditional (in 2004) method of managing knowledge creation deserves further research.

"The Speed of Collaborative Communities"

I found this http://wiki-management.com/blog/ by searching Twitter. This is a blog dated 15 November 2010.

Rod Collins, the author, talks about horizontal vs vertical - - he is referring to how organizations, well, organize themselves. Some organizations are vertically organized and managed in vertical silos. Others are moving towards a more horizontal alignment where teams of people across verticals work together to solve issues.

That's what we do at work - we solve problems. We come up with solutions. If there were no problems, we wouldn't have jobs.

Take Minnesota State University, for example. This organization solves the problem of education. There are people who want to learn and MSU provides a solution. However, like most educational organizations, MSU is likely vertically organized. There are likely many different educational disciplines, all fighting for funding, all pining for students. Depending on many factors including the economy, marketing effectiveness, political climates, even worldwide events, one discipline may be edging out and may have more students, more funding, than the others.

In the late 80s and early 90s, I remember not being able to get into computer science classes - they were perpetually 'full' - semester after semester, year after year. While all these students were focused on computer science, other disciplines were perhaps suffering from smaller enrollment, less funding. What would happen if the disciplines collaborated horizontally instead of being siloed vertically?

This might mean that the English department and the Physical Education (PE) department collaborate to find a solution to a particular issue. Or maybe they just continue to work on opposite sides of the field, and start to have conversations about resources. Perhaps through horizontal collaboration, the English department finds out there is an Olympic hopeful swimming the Butterfly at the speed of sound who always wanted to write a book about his experiences - but he doesn't know where to begin. At the same time, there may be hundreds of cooped-up, stressed out, burned out English majors in need of some PE outlet. A couple of courses about the physiological makeup of the body might help them learn the importance and benefits of de-stressing.

By collaborating horizontally we find things out about each other that we didn't know before. We find things out that we didn't know that we knew or that we wanted to know. We become richer.

Wiki Management Conversations

Some things I've heard around the water cooler:

We need to manage the corporate wiki
I can't find anything when I go to the wiki
I'm not sure how to create a page and if I did how would people find it
I want to create a wiki page that talks about our department and I want people to contribute to it
How do we add tags like keywords and metatags like author and expiration date?
What is the background of this wiki software - is it a database or is it xml?
Should we all be learning xml?
How do we single source the content in the wiki?
Should EVERYTHING be on the wiki?
How do we manage read/write access?
Should everyone have read/write access? If so, what will happen to the content?
How good is our content , how do we test the efficacy?
How many people each day go to the wiki?
What do the users want? How do we serve them?
What is the ROI?

Reflection of my experience ENG 673 Fall 2010

This is a post to help me brainstorm ways to fulfill an ENG 673 assignment titled, "Reflect upon your experience this semester and your identity as a technical communicator."

I would say a year ago I probably did not know my place in technical communications. I started working as a technical writer in 1991 and am still employed as a technical writer today although a few years ago I started to feel the burnout and questioned whether I wanted to continue or take another path. I started looking at other career options including management, data warehousing, creative writing, and journalism. In the beginning, I set out to be a civil engineer, morphed over into chemistry, took some english classes, and reclaimed my love of writing in the spirit of technology as a technical writer.

But I got bored, or distracted, or lost along the way. While researching graduate studies in creative writing, I looked back at my alma mater, MNSU and discovered the Technical Communications graduate studies courses. One caught my attention - Visual Technical Communication. I had become interested in data graphics and the display of technical information in many visual forms including graphs and charts and so this seemed like the class for me.

As an experienced technical writer and graphic artist in Information Technology with a special interest in end-user authored content, my place in this industry is to help others step back and take a good long look at all the 'stuff' that's published and how it might be managed. More specifically, wikis have been around long enough for some type of content management to be applied to them by now but wiki cms is basically unheard of.

Today, my company uses a corporate wiki to push content out to users but also allows a set of those users to author their own content through an approval system. We still don't have all of this figured out and I'm afraid we'll end up with a stockpile of gobbledygook without a way to manage it. I think if we apply some type of cms or web cms to the wiki while it is in its early stages of adoption, we'll come out with a more searchable, usable, maintainable, efficient end-user authored system.

Research Proposal IRB application draft

Summary of Task Due for ENG 673 - MNSU.

Draft a research proposal and IRB application for your project.

Write a 3-5 page research proposal and draft an IRB application to do research involving human participants.

Basically, a proposal is asking for permission, and an IRB is an application. Just like a proposal for a new project at work, a research proposal involves work - a little persuasive writing. The following content was copied from my ENG 673 assignment:

an academic research proposal consists of five parts:

1. An introduction that establishes the topic and introduces the research question.
2. A review of literature (existing research) related to the topic and identifies a "gap" which your project will fill.*
3. A proposed research methodology that will help you find an answer to your research question.
4. A time line that estimates how long it will take you to complete the project and identifies any major milestones along the way.
5. A bibliography of sources that you think you will use in the research project.

You can find additional information here:
Writing Your Research Prospectus, Colorado State University
http://www.colorado.edu/pwr/writingtips/20.html
How to Write an Abstract/Prospectus, University of Nevada Las Vegas Writing Center
http://writingcenter.unlv.edu/writing/abstract.html

In addition to getting permission from your adviser to pursue your research topic, you may also need specific permission to gather data from people. The Institutional Research Board (IRB) protects the rights and welfare of all human participants in research conducted at or by Minnesota State University, Mankato.

To gain permission from the MSU Mankato IRB you must submit an application that describes what you will do, why you will do it, who you will use as participants, how you will reach them, and how you will protect them. Fortunately the IRB has posted several documents to guide your work:

• Description of the IRB
• Proposal Guidelines
• Consent form samples

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So, I've started some of this on my blog just because talking it out is a way of brainstorming that helps me find my way:
Introduction
Corporate wikis - their number - their usage - a definition. How are they managed? Why has the technical communications community not become better at managing corporate wiki content created by the end user? How has this affected the quality of the content and the efficacy of the wiki? What do the proponents and opponents say about managing this type of content? How can it be managed? Should it be managed? If it were managed the way online help is managed, what benefits would we see? Would the world be a better place? How do you know? Why should I care?

Lit Review

Proposed Research Methodology

Time line
- 1-2 years

Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography blog

Blog post to brainstorm about ENG 673 assignment, "Develop your annotated bibliography (plus any additional research necessary) into a literature review."

What is already known about corporate wikis is that they are in use today, there is more than one way to manage the content and there is more than one tool choice. What is not known is how much better corporate wikis are being managed today than they were ten years ago. Research exists about content management systems but not specifically about wiki content management systems. Wikis are unique in that they are a sort of open forum and have traditionally been free of cumbersome content management rules and guidelines.

While all this is good for the author it is not good for the user conducting a search of a corporate wiki for particular content or even for an overview of all existing content.


Annotated Bib to follow...