Wiki Trials

I have had very limited success so far with the Wiki Trials that I have tried to implement. I organised a PB Wiki site for some colleagues just to test how effective they could be with communication across the group and so far very few people have used it. There was an initial attempt at use but without collaboration from the whole team it just falls by the wayside.

Has anybody out there had success with Wikis and how do you motivate people to use them?

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Comment by Laura Gibbs on September 18, 2007 at 7:42am: I'm someone who prefers using blogs to wikis for all kinds of reasons, but I do have one group-wiki success story which I can share:

I recently moved away from one state to another, and this was a crisis for a Greek reading group I was in! We had been meeting for five years as a group, and now we needed to find an online method to carry on as a group: since I could no longer attend the face-to-face meetings, we needed some online component. I am the only really technology-oriented person in the group; none of the people in the group had ever used blogs or wikis before.

But, I set up a PBWiki, made it private (I don't feel a need to make it private, but that was important for the other people in the group... even though we used to meet in public cafes and actually enjoyed people eavesdropping on us and asking us what we were doing!) - and then for each Greek Bible verse we were reading I made a page in the wiki - SO EASY TO DO because of how pages are created in a wiki - and each person would then read the verse and type in their comments on the page.

The group still continues to meet every week without me, but by interacting online via the wiki, I am able to contribute all my thoughts and ideas. Plus THEY now interact throughout the week online via the wiki, in addition to their face to face meeting.

And here's the best part: the group considers the meetings to be WAY BETTER than the meetings were before, when they had no online preparation component. They all make their editorial contributions to the page in time for me to read and respond to them (which I do the day before their face to face meeting), and then they have a great online preparation experience before their face to face meeting - plus they are interacting with each other via the wiki, supplementing what had been a very limited once a week meeting.

So, what made this wiki a success:
- strong group identity and commitment to a common goal
- wiki activity reinforced by other interactions
- ease of use in setting up and maintaining the wiki

We used PBWiki to do this; for people with NO real technology sophistication, it met their needs perfectly. They all really liked the WYSIWYG editor and found it very easy to use.

Comment by Jo Norris on September 24, 2007 at 9:52pm: Thanks Laura, I think the major issue that I have is these guys have a really bad history of communicating with each other in the first place. I have tryed the PB wiki and wiki spaces and both have had a very poor response. I think the moral of the story is, unless a member of the group instigates it then you've probably got buckley's!!!!

Its been one of those days when the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be fading!!