
Ask HN: Why do non-techies simply not "get" the idea of a wiki? - RiderOfGiraffes
We here at work have been trying to reduce paperwork while simultaneously increasing knowledge dissemination.  For some time the techies have been using a wiki, and others are starting to get the point that when they ask a question the first response is "Have you checked on the wiki?"  The answer until recently has always been "no", and the question now is answered about half the time by doing what they should have done in the first place.<p>It's like "Let me Google that for you"<p>So we've moved the holiday booking system to the wiki.  Now people can say when they're away on site, working from home, sick, or on leave.  The leave days can be booked in advance and then confirmed by their line manager.  At a glance we can see who is in, out, available or away, and the system is really helping our planning.  Suddenly everyone knows when someone is on site and might need support, or on leave and unable to help.  The non-techies have themselves said, when shown it, that it's really useful.<p>But the non-techies just don't "get it."  They won't update the wiki, they still don't look at the wiki, they never add information to the wiki.  Instead, they insist on sending things by email.  Then in a few weeks time people are asking, and we have to trawl through email systems to find the information.<p>Except we (the techies) don't, because when we get information we put it on the wiki.  Then when the non-techies ask us anything we can say "Have you checked the wiki?"<p>And they still don't get it.<p>Where is the mis-match?  How can we make a wiki as accessible/understandable as a Word document?<p>How can we help the non-techies attain enlightenment?<p><i>Can</i> the non-techies attain enlightenment?
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mixmax
This sounds like a classical techies/non-techies problem. The techies are
trying to implement something, in this case a wiki, that is an unknown concept
to everyone else. And since the techies "get it" they expect everyone else to
get it too.

The thing is that to the rest of the organisation there are probably the
following problems:

\- they don't know what a wiki is, and they don't much care. Even though they
use wikipedia they don't necessarily grasp the concept behind it: They just
see a single entry, happily oblivious to how it got there.

\- they don't want to learn what a wiki is, unless it directly helps them in
the short term.

\- They have ingrained ways of doing things. Changing people's behaviour is
like changing direction of a supertanker: It takes a lot of time and effort.

The solution is to keep pushing it, paying attention to the following:

\- Make it worth people's while in the short term. Reading your post it sounds
like you may already be well on the way here.

\- Make it easy. Usability should be top-notch, and there should be help
available everywhere. If it's as simple as a mac it will be much easier to
turn people around.

\- Make sure that some things can only be done in the wiki, forcing people to
do it. Don't put people's e-mails in the wiki, force them to do so themself.

~~~
mikeyur
I agree that you should force them into making the change. You won't make the
most friends doing it, but it'll be less of a hassle.

You need to take the 'facebook approach.'

A lot of people HATED the new facebook design when it originally launched. I'm
sure you remember, there were groups with millions of members saying "bring
back the old facebook" and complaining about everything.

Months later everything has calmed down, for the most part people like it and
the change needed to happen. Facebook needed to make the change to implement
new features, design elements, etc.

They'll be mad at first but eventually get over.

~~~
JabavuAdams
History looks backwards, but decisions have to be made looking forwards.

How do you distinguish the case where you do something unpopular, refuse to
change it to conform to your users' wishes, and are _wrong_?

~~~
mikeyur
It's a gamble you have to take. Facebook has enough users and enough people
depend on the platform that they can make a change (not too drastic) and not
many, if any people will leave.

------
geuis
The problem isn't the idea of the wiki. It's the implementation. Any non-
techie gets how to write a blog post in Wordpress. Spacing, make things bold,
etc. I've been editing with various wiki software for years and I still find
it cumbersome. If you can have a system that is a wiki under the hood but has
a normal-person level interface, you would see more usage. Regular folks have
better things to do than learn our odd syntaxes for doing things. It's not
something that saves them time because instead of being easy and automatic,
they have to break their trains of thought to do this "wiki" thing. It's no
different than when your coding in the zone and your manager interrupts you
about something marketing wants.

~~~
wallflower
>The problem isn't the idea of the wiki. It's the implementation.

We use Atlassian's Confluence. Confluence is a nice collaboration tool built
on wiki concepts. Us techies used a wiki prior but Atlassian's almost-a-wiki-
but-not-as-scary-as-one is now so popular that it is a major issue when
Confluence is down. It is pretty much company-wide now and updated almost
every minute.

~~~
JimmyL
+1 for Confluence

Yes, it's not free (or Free) and is made by a pretty established company, but
it's a solid product, Wiki enough that if you want to get into it, there is a
lot fo customization and detail that you can do, but at he same time friendly
enough that if you don't care, you can just use the WYSIWYG editor to make
your point. It also integrates nicely with JIRA, although I doubt that's used
by much of the HN crowd.

As for getting people to use it, my team made a rule that if you sent us a
question that (in our opinion) belonged in the wiki, we'd answer it there and
send you back a link. After a few weeks of doing that, people just stopped
asking and went there first.

------
iamdave
Stop calling it a Wiki. Call it a knowledge base and watch activity boom.

It works.

~~~
dotcoma
agree. it's full of people who ain't "wiki" enough, ya know...

(in their brains, I mean)

------
artlogic
I have seen a great deal of wiki-phobia, even among so called techies. No
matter how many wikis I deploy, this inevitably occurs. Here's my take on the
problem:

\- Wikis require a heroic effort to keep organized. Most people, when faced
with creating a new category, or even a new page would rather send an e-mail
and forget it. The fact that you have to not only post something, but also
decide where it belongs makes the job of posting feel much harder. "You mean I
have to categorize my content before I post?"

\- Wikis require more cognitive effort on the part of the poster. With e-mail
or a message board, you can essentially dump your brain and hit send. With a
wiki, you have to integrate your post, not only into the organization, as I
mentioned above, but also into an existing post(s). "You mean I have to read
and understand other content before I post?"

\- Most wiki markup is based on the ideas behind the semantic web and should
remain readable and understandable even in markup mode - unfortunately, people
don't like to cede control of the way their document looks. I have seen non-
techies spend hours jumping through HTML/WYSIWYG hoops simply to achieve a
particular look - not realizing the nightmare of editing such a page (think
word generated HTML pasted into the page). "You mean I have to sacrifice my
format before I post?"

\- Finally most wiki software doesn't have a easy to use e-mail notification
system. Many times you have to manually "watch" a page instead of just
watching the whole wiki or a whole category. When you do get an update e-mail
- you have to actually go to the wiki - no hitting reply - this again
interrupts cognitive flow for a lot of folks. "You mean I have to keep track
of all the changes myself?"

I love wikis, and certainly think that they can increase productivity - but
they require a greater cognitive effort on the part of the poster, and a lot
of folks are unable to make the short term sacrifices to achieve the long term
gain a wiki can offer.

------
vivekkhurana
What you are facing is a standard problem in adaptation of technology. What
most techies think usable might not be that much usable by non-techie user. As
far as wiki is concerned, I find it challenging to use a wiki even being a
techie. The obnoxious syntax of wiki is sufficient to scare away several
users. As you mentioned, people like to send email, I would suggest creating a
separate mailbox for leave applications and then writing bunch of scripts to
parse the email and put the email in wiki, db or whatever you want to. Second
option is to use a CMS and create web form, as most CMS have support for forms
and reporting built in. I have done this with drupal couple of times and the
solution has been received well by non-techies. In the end, what ever comments
you receive on this thread will turn out to be useless if you are not willing
to understand the reason why non-techies are not using the wiki ? Few minutes
spent with the end user will save you several hours of developing and
deploying a solution that will not be used by non-technies...

~~~
sam_in_nyc
Agreed. Wiki syntax is a turn off.

------
sam_in_nyc
Because editing wikis is an excruciating experience. Just look at the edit
page... it's a textarea with strange icons above it, and the most fucked up
formatting you've ever seen.

I'm technically inclined but I shutter at the idea of having to write anything
in a Wiki, because the syntax is so unintuitive and annoying. I seem to recall
adding line breaks, and it NOT showing line breaks on the preview. It was one
of the use user experiences I've ever had: some fucktard decided that hitting
"enter" wasn't enough to add a "<br>" to the content, so I have to go and dig
through documentation to find out how to do it. Pisses me off thinking about
it.

~~~
jrockway
Sure, if you use MediaWiki that's true. As far as I know, nobody uses that for
internal corporate wikis; that is what wikis like Socialtext are for.

~~~
ahoyhere
Socialtext! Hahaha.

There was a time once, when I was paid to work on Socialtext... but I'll spare
you.

Let's just say that Socialtext is not the usability professional's answer of
choice to MediaWiki.

~~~
jrockway
I am fairly familiar with the backend (lots of bitter Socialtext friends), and
hate to recommend it for that reason, but the UI seems nicer than MediaWiki.

Also, I like to shill Perl whenever possible. :)

------
gaius
A lot of management types don't really grok that an email can be written by a
machine, let alone that a web page can be generated as opposed to written by
hand. I am certain half the automated reports I send out, many of the
recipients think I am drawing the graphs and tables in Excel, cutting and
pasting them into Outlook and sending them (ermm, at midnight every night).

------
Tichy
To edit a wiki usually requires understanding a markup language. Maybe some
people simply go to a blank state of mind whenever they see markup.

Have you trained the non-techies in using the markup language?

~~~
figured
the fckeditor plugin handles this problem, we use it at our business and
people seem to like it.

------
matt1
I'm in a _very_ similar situation.

We use Microsoft's Enterprise Information Management at my work. It was rolled
out about a year ago and is now primarily used as a replacement for storing
files. I started playing around with it and discovered, to my delight, that
there's a built-in wiki feature.

There's a huge place for it in our daily operations. It could save thousands
of hours in the long run if we got only a few people to contribute. The
problem is that second part: How do you get people to contribute?

Here's my strategy:

1\. Privately create lots of stubs beforehand along with an intelligent
structure for linking them together. Also add tons of how-to articles (because
for non-technies, obvious isn't so obvious)

2\. Add pages that show how people could actually benefit from it

3\. Brief our management, stressing the benefits, and ask for them to push it
within their organizations

4\. If all goes well, people will slowly start adding information. If even 5%
of the employees contribute, it will quickly reach a tipping point and then
explode in popularity.

5\. I'll continue to add and edit articles on a daily basis for the next few
months regardless of the initial reaction

6\. Gradually make it the go-to point for certain types of information,
forcing people to use it and see how useful it can be

I'm at step #2 right now. I'll have the opportunity to brief the management in
about three weeks.

Also, I'm going to call it a "collaborative notebook" as that encompasses how
people can benefit from it much more than calling it a wiki or knowledge base.

The thing I've found is that even just telling people what I'm doing in basic
terms is unclear. They hear "wiki" and go "wiki wiki wiki" and then nod their
heads when I'm explaining things to them.

What I've realized is that its not their fault if they don't understand what
you're doing. Its your fault for not explaining it to them in a way that makes
it clear.

We'll see what happens... wish me luck.

------
brusqe
I was heavily involved with a university project of designing and building an
open wheel racecar. We tried to do the exact same thing, that is, reduce our
paperwork while increase knowledge dissemination (as well as knowledge
retention and accountability for work).

At first we implemented a wiki. The techie guys on the team saw the long-term
value of it and filled it in dutifully, however, many people simply didn't
"get" the idea. The wiki ended up stagnating, as only a handful of people used
it. The non-techie guys would inevitably ask about what was currently
happening, of which the answer was already posted on the wiki. People just
never warmed to it. Knowledge management and communication _should not_ be a
struggle, or else it will fall by the way side.

The solution was to step away from a wiki system (MediaWiki) and towards
something else (Basecamp). Basecamp fitted in with how everyone used the net.
Message threads that were relevant to people were sent to their inbox, they
could reply to from their own mail account. Milestones are clear - tasks are
clear. It's just usable and seamless.

A wiki has a perceived barrier of entry. It's a lot to take on at once for a
non-techie. Using the systems which are currently in place, (eg email, a
homepage/dashboard setup) to disseminate info will go a long way, rather than
fighting an uphill battle of getting people to understand #REDIRECT
[[pagename]]

------
Angostura
Why on earth are you trying to use a Wiki as a calendaring app whn there are
so many good calendaring apps out there. _I'm_ fairly techie - but if someone
told me to edit a Wiki to put my holidays in, I would not be amused.

You'll be getting them to use vi to enter expenses claims next.

~~~
KWD
I agree here. A Wiki does not seem to be a good base for a 'holiday booking'
tool. Of course, personally, I've always been a fan of Lotus Notes for being
able to adapt applications like this to the normal workflow of an office.

------
mattmaroon
I think the problem is that you're assuming something is wrong with the non-
techies rather than that something is wrong with the wiki.

------
ntoshev
It's not a techie/non-techie distinction, it is about level of exposure to
wikis and similar things that people have. Ten years ago techies didn't get
wikis either.

------
jodrellblank
In our case the answer was to move from a technically good wiki with lots of
features to a Microsoft solution (Sharepoint) severely lacking in features but
looking prettier.

------
tokenadult
People from a certain generation (or people in your generation who studied
certain subjects in school) were told that working collaboratively in school
is "cheating," and so in the workplace they don't distinguish situations where
working collaboratively is supporting the team. I suspect the main problem is
cultural and would show up however you try to get your colleagues to
collaborate.

------
niels_olson
I use a wiki to take notes. I run navyhpsp.net, which is a wiki for Navy
Health Professions Scholarship students distributed all over the US and
recently overtook the official Navy HPSP site on Google (google for "Navy
HPSP") I also set up a wiki for my med school (at the Dean's request).

I don't understand why there would be universal appeal to a corporate wiki,
not unless it's searchable by google, in which case you at least have a chance
of the information coming up when you go looking for "boilerplate" information
in a search engine.

People inevitably choose different ways of doing things. If a group of you is
using a wiki, then run with it. Don't force people to use it. If it's better,
they'll get curious and ask about it. If not, don't worry about them. Every
time you ask people to play with your toys, you are spending political
capital. Conserve your capital. If you make them play with your toys, you can
bet they'll cry and call for mom and dad, at best. At worst, they might try to
break your toys.

------
zepolen
"What the fuck is a Wiki?"

Is probably what goes through the non-techie's mind.

Use terminology they are familiar with; "the online notice whiteboard" or
something.

------
c1sc0
Cognitive load: it takes effort to learn a new way of doing things, especially
if the 'old way' is deeply ingrained in the organization. You'll be amazed at
the lengths people will go in order not to have to memorize things. If the
perceived efficiency gain is not immediately clear people will _not_ learn
something new.

------
slater
Try and get them in to a "gotcha" moment: The next time they ask some question
already answered on the wiki, point them to it, instead of giving them the
answer (unless it's critical that they need the answer RIGHT NOW).

Nudge 'em to explore, and then go to the next step by telling them they can
edit all and everything, and add new pages.

------
skmurphy
It's an interesting thread. Historically organizations faced these same
challenges getting people to consult a website and use E-mail, both of which
are now viewed as the default. The problems you are facing do not come from
the fact that non-techies are stupid. And learning how to solve them is good
practice for working with normal prospects (vs. early adopters).

One specific suggestion: pick one thing that will reliably be in the wiki and
get people used to checking it just for that. Then branch out. Two good places
to start: meeting agenda page becomes meeting minutes that any attendee can
modify; internal or product specifications that would benefit from a wiki's
ability to branch to background and related pages.

I don't think it's a technology barrier at all (unless you are forcing them to
use Wiki markup instead of a WYSIWYG editor) it's force of habit.

------
RKlophaus
Wikis are like commenting code. They both require you to write some stuff down
_now_ in case someone else needs it in the _future_.

Think of how long it took you to learn the value of good commenting... That's
about how long it will take to teach people why they should document their
business practices on a wiki.

------
eatenbyagrue
From what I've seen, most people really dislike the formatting the most.
Plenty of people get the 'track changes' feature in Word, but when you edit a
wiki you have to use a markup language. Simple or not, any kind of symbolic
representation for text is patently foreign to most non-techies.

------
callmeed
We just gave up on this. We serve professional photographers, who tend to be
above average in terms of techie-ness.

We implemented PB Wiki for our support pages. No one updated it.

We spelled it out in big letters on the wiki home page. No one updated it.

We even had a contest. _Every time you add to a wiki page, you're entered to
win a prize_. No one updated it.

Not only did no one update it, it confused customers. Customers confused the
"login" link at the top of the wiki with the login area of their CMS. That
simply resulted in _more support tickets_.

So, this year we simply moved our support pages to WordPress and only our
staff can update them.

Since it appears your wiki is internal, maybe you have a better chance, but it
would take some serious staff development in my opinion.

------
jwilliams
I see the opposite problem - Customers want "wikis" and "blogs", but don't
really know what they are, or don't fully understand the implications (e.g.
"on our corporate wiki anyone can write anything they want? what if they write
something bad!?").

------
nihilocrat
In my experience, wikis are all doomed to becoming out of date and not a
trusted information source, because the really important information ends up
being in peoples' heads, or in code, or something like that. The wiki can only
give you A) a 10,000-foot view of a system, or B) the details of that system
as it existed.... two or three years ago.

Honestly, this doesn't really have anything to do with the original post,
because it's happened in techie-only or techie-dominated companies I've been
in. Anyone else had this experience?

------
rfunduk
This sort of thing can really slow an entire company down.

Work on getting it mentioned in performance reviews. If 'non-techies' start to
have their bosses poking around asking questions about "so why do I keep
hearing that you refuse to use the wiki?", that'll help.

I mean, really. A wiki is about as technical as a whiteboard... they're just
being lazy. No one's asking them to make beautifully formatted pages, just get
the stuff in there because _that's how we track it_... it's part of their job.
They need to realize it.

------
padmanabhan01
Technology is there to serve us and NOT vice versa.

If people are only comfortable with emails, well, techies should think of a
way to scan and update the wiki with info in the email automatically.

------
KWD
I think the overall question is what problem is the wiki a solution too, and
is it the best solution?

What information is the non-IT user really having to disseminate to others?
What value is it truly providing? How have you made adding the information to
a wiki not be additional work? Is it improving productivity or reducing it?

And finally, who has ownership of the project? If you do not have a non-IT
owner it'll 'gather dust' if the value of the application is not easily
perceived.

------
cabalamat
Have various things that are (1) essential, and (2) can only be done on the
wiki.

For example: well them they can't go on holiday unless they book their holiday
days into the wiki.

Also, overtime. Do people at your work get paid overtime? If so, make the
system so that they don't get paid it unless they put their overtime hours on
the wiki.

------
icefox
It is all about momentum. From their perspective the email system still works.
Sure there is this "wick-ee" thing, but they don't care because it seems like
they don't have to use it. Go and checkout the book "Diffusion of innovation".
It explains all about this.

------
sachinag
"A wiki is an electronic whiteboard. Anyone can erase, add information, or
redraw stuff. But try to be nice and respect the stuff that's come before;
only add stuff that needs to be added."

------
jderick
Maybe you should be talking to your users more.

------
TweedHeads
WYSIWYG

Period.

------
giles_bowkett
Your title is invalid. Non-techies get Wikipedia.

Additionally, your real question does not belong on Hacker News. You're
dealing with the problem of how to accomodate the uselessness of mediocre
people whom you're obligated to tolerate. The numbing pain of tolerating
mediocrity has no place on a startup site.

