Designing a templated wiki which aims to make the process less scary and bafflilng. Presented to the Information Design Conference at Greenwich, UK in April 2012

1. a case study in managing user-contributed information on a public
website
Mark Barratt | Text Matters | Information Design Conference 2012

2.  Help people working in voluntary organisations
share their knowledge
 In a useful format
 With a process that is inclusive and accessible
 Including peer review/rating
 And peer updating
 By making ‘wikiable’ content more usable
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

3.  Politics: helping people work together painlessly
 Economics: curation of knowledge is expensive
and time-consuming: anything which may help is
useful
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

4.  Authority plus comment
 Corrections hard to integrate
and attribute
 Potentially-important comments
off the visible page
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

5.  Bulletin board on the web
 Appropriate for developing ideas
 Useful stuff distributed in a thread
 Not useful for reference or how-to articles
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7.  Website for people in the voluntary sector
 ‘Everything and everyone you need to know to run
a nonprofit’
 Launched April 2009
 5000+ pages of reference and learning material
 26,000+ UK registered users
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

8.  First web
browser/
editor
 1990
 What’s the
point of just
reading?
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

9.  First ‘wiki’ 1994
‘...not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors.
Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an
ongoing process of creation and collaboration
that constantly changes the Web site landscape.’
 Wikipedia 2001
 Not a mass-participation sport
 Wikipedia participation rate 0.02%
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

10.  Wikipedia
 WikiHow (and its peers)
 Lots of closed & special-interest groups
 er, that’s it
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

11. Focus on dialogue not co-composition
 Email 1971
 Bulletin Boards 1978
 CompuServe, The Source, 1979
 TheGlobe (1995) SixDegrees (1997) failed
 Friendster 2002
 MySpace 2003
 Facebook 2004
 Twitter 2006
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

12.  Nothing fatal, but most web users ignorant,
daunted, or baffled
 Wiki markup in some wikis:
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

13.  Avoid wiki markup: make it feel like Word
 Provide guidance on document structure to help
both readers and writers
 Make participation obvious and not scary, without
buggering up prime function of documents – to be
read
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

14.  Clear user requests: just tell me how to do X
 Wanted to test hypothesis:
 Structured documents helpful
 Step-by-step instructions
 Budget for lab-based user testing
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18. Promoting the how-tos involved incessant use of
 Twitter
 Facebook
 Conferences
 Old-fashioned arm-twisting
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21.  ‘Normal’ site content
 Three new sections made wikiable
 Provide ‘content types’ choice for new pages
 Include discussion and history
 Signal wikiness without overwhelming scan-and-
read functions
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

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23.  No budget for labs
 Small test groups
 Paper prototypes
 Revise and retest rapidly
 From paper to ‘test server’ ASAP
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32. Wikiable sections termed iKnowHow & promoted
 Much tweeting and blogging ‘iKnowHow’
 Previews at conferences/meeting
 Editorial in Guardian Society online
 Adoption of ‘Blue Dots’ incentives for contributors
 Quiet arm-twisting of likely contributors
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

33.  First wikiable articles available 14 March 2012
 First-month participation rate well above
Wikipedia’s, both
 Edits of existing articles
 Creation of new articles
 No usability problems reported. None.
 Likely to get quiet and build (if at all) slowly
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

34.  Fail early, fail often strategy works
 Two planned features not (yet) in the iKnowHow
service:
 Rating and reputation for content and
contributors. Wicked problem
 An interactive glossary not yet ready/easy to use
 Otherwise ‘too early to say’.
Mark Barratt | Text Matters

35.  This stuff is hard
 Information/interaction design can make it fail
 It can’t make it succeed.
You need a great client: in this case the KnowHow
NonProfit digital team at NCVO (National Council for
Voluntary Organisations)
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