The Orange Chair

The thing to remember here is that a wiki starts with a lack of structure so that its users can define the structure that best serves their needs. That’s what makes it so successful. People don’t have to learn a new structure, and fit their work into that structure, which is automatically limiting. Instead, they can focus on their work, and build a structure as they go - one that evolves with their information and doesn’t get in the way!

- Stewart Mader, “The nine-letter word that determines wiki success”, Wikipatterns blog

A few weeks ago, I would have agreed whole-heartedly with Stewart Mader, whose Wikipatterns site and book have taught me a lot about wiki adoption. But working on getting a wiki off the ground has made me wonder if I need to learn more about information architecture in this Web 2.0 world. I want to make it easy for people to browse through resources and contribute their own. As a wiki gardener, I’m not trying to make the wiki follow the clean, formal lines of an English garden, but I do want to encourage it to grow and make sure the good parts get enough exposure.

I’m building scaffolds and seeding the wiki with content, but I’m still figuring out how to balance making the wiki useful and making it rough enough to invite participation. I’ve started reading about information design and information architecture, but the hyperlinked, organic nature of wikis makes it an interesting challenge. When is it better to break things up into lots of small, addressable bits, and when is it better to combine pages so that someone can edit everything at the same time? How do you balance people’s desires for sophisticated interfaces with the ease of modification of simple markup? How do you create enough structure to make it easy for people to navigate, but not so much structure that people feel restricted?

Here’s how I’m dealing with those challenges:

• Focus on getting lots of content into the wiki. Comfortable page length will depend on whether your wiki engine supports section editing. If you can’t edit sections, break pages apart into sections that you can edit easily. Don’t think too much about the level of detail, though, as you can always refactor pages. I started with pages of about 500 words, and then I combined or separated chunks as I needed them.
• Optimize for input. Make it easy for casual wiki readers to add to the content. Whether that’s an inbox page that they can add to if they don’t know where else to put things, section editors so that they can quickly find the part they want to update, or an e-mail address they can send wiki content to, help people just get the information into the wiki.
• Build multiple paths through the content. People can come to a wiki page from anywhere, so provide plenty of links to related content and context. Create pages for navigation, too.

I’m looking forward to learning more about the topic!