What could go wrong when using a wiki?

Wikis are easy to use but sometimes new users are hesitant to jump right in and become contributors. Here's a list of some common excuses for not contributing.

Collective editing
Many apprehensive users are uncomfortable with collective editing. The idea that someone can edit your text on the Web really is a key reason why some are hesitant to use wikis. However, the concept does not seem quite as dangerous if you think of your site as a whiteboard. You and your colleagues likely could use a whiteboard to collaborate on the solution to a problem -- all sharing the whiteboard, adding, deleting, and modifying its content until you come to a solution through collaboration. A wiki takes the whiteboard analogy one step further -- consider a room with multiple whiteboards. Each page of the wiki becomes its own whiteboard that users can share and can easily add links to other pages. For those sites where it is necessary to manage or to control who edits the content, most wikis support features like permissions (e.g., page access control) and may also be either public or private (e.g., limited user group).

Common problems with Wikis
Several common problems have been identified for wikis, or sites which allow anyone to create or to edit content.

• Spamming
  The addition of inapplicable content to a page by individuals in order to increase their websites' page ranking on search engines
• Content deletion
  The deletion of text from a page that was entered by another contributor
• Flame wars
  Wikis depend upon cooperation among the community to avoid the flame wars that often plauge e-mail, discussion groups, and blogs. Many wikis either implicitly or explicitly encourage people to contribute material that most people would find objective. The NPOV (neutral point of view) is emphasized on some wikis, such as Wikipedia.
• Vandalism of content
  Deliberately and maliciously deleting and/or changing content on the page (e.g., adding obscene content)

Some note that such bad behavior is not generally successful in active wikis.

• Content is often corrected fairly quickly using the revision history view and the feature to revert content.
• Some wikis provide the ability to "ban" (by IP address) someone from editing the wiki.

The References page includes links to websites which discuss how such behavior has been managed on Wikipedia, the largest existing wiki.

Content Management Challenges
When managing a wiki site, you also often need to watch for

• duplication of effort (e.g., multiple pages created on the same topic)
• inconsistent content
• neglect

Through an active content development community and attention to healthy usage patterns, the usefulness of a wiki can be improved in real time.