Wikipatterns – Getting the Most out of Your Own Wiki Experience by Learning from Others

(Previously, on elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog at ITtoolbox)

Tags: Wikipatterns, Atlassian, Confluence, Wikis, IBM, ShortCuts, Podcasts, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Web2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Communities, Patterns, Best Practices

Over the last few days I have actually been reading off my RSS feeds on a new offering put together by the folks over at Atlassian, the same guys behind the fine Confluence wiki engine, that I wish it would have been made available some time ago. Yes, that is right. I am talking about Wikipatterns that Stewart Mader has put together with his team and which he announced over at Introducing Wikipatterns.com a couple of days ago. What fantastic resource, indeed !

Reason why I mentioned above that I wish Wikipatterns would have been made available some time ago is because it would have been a really nice and handy resource that I would have been able to reuse for the several podcasting episodes I have been doing lately with my colleagues from ibm.com over at IBM Shortcuts around the subject of wikis and getting the most out of them.

Yes, that is right. I have mentioned this in the past, although over at my other Internet weblog. For the last couple of months I have been participating in the IBM ShortCuts podcast sharing a number of different tips on making the most out of social computing tools, and lately, have been talking a bit about wikis and how different teams and communities can make the most out of the whole experience.

And this is exactly why I would have loved Wikipatterns would have become available sooner so that I could leverage with some of the great stuff that has been shared over there. But what exactly is Wikipatterns you may be wondering, right? Well, it is, of course, a wiki page where a number of different patterns have been put together that detail how you can get the most out of wikis with the least effort possible. That is, with this particular offering you can read all about the dos and don’ts of participating in a wiki. What is good for the team or the community and, much more interesting, what is not that good for your team or your community when making use of a wiki.

However, what I really like about this particular Web site is the fact that for the first time there are a number of different roles identified from different wiki users. So by observing pretty close how the rest of your team is collaborating in such a shared space as a wiki you have got the opportunity to identify those "people patterns" or "people anti-patterns" and be able act upon them if you may need to. Not only from the perspective of helping find the most active and participative wiki collaborators, but also those other folks you would need to watch out and perhaps act upon them at some point in time.

Impressive, eh? You bet! I think that Wikipatterns is going to be one of those services that will prove incredibly useful for all of those businesses that are still struggling with the adoption of social computing within the enterprise as it would allow them to get the most out of the already existing collective knowledge and experiences put together by other knowledge workers who have been making use of wikis for quite some time already.

So Wikipatterns is the perfect Web site to point people to, who may be a bit skeptic about the whole thing of sharing knowledge and collaborating in an open environment where everyone is at the same level and encouraged to add content on top of each other’s content. Like I said, I wish this offering would have been made available several months ago because I would have been able to make use of it to convinced a few on why they may need a wiki, or not, instead of having to do it the hard way. Either way I am hoping that Wikipatterns continues to grow further showing, and demonstrating successfully, to people how wikis could become one of the most powerful collaborative and knowledge sharing environments to date.

And all of that, not to worry, without you having to worry about anything. Just leveraging on the already existing experiences from different knowledge workers. Way cool, eh? I now just wish I can find some time to help out and add some further content to it, because there more there is to it, the much better it would be for everyone else to learn how you can improve your own wiki experience. I already signed up (Only takes a couple of minutes!) and I am surely looking forward to find some spare time to add further up into it… How about you? Are you ready to share your best, or not so best, wiki experiences?

Let’s do it!