How can this Wiki can be used in community processes?
The Wiki could be effective both in attracting new members to the community and in retaining long-time members. Please refer to the research by Dr. Derek Hansen on "Knowledge sharing, maintenance and use in online support communities". This page is used to collect ideas on using the Wiki to help communities. (For purposes here, each high level partition of this Wiki - called the knowledge base - is a sub-community).
Integrate the Wiki and the forum together in the community process:
- Question and answers could be selected from the forum, decontextualized and posted to the Wiki for easier reuse. This allows these answers to show up directly in search engine results and helps to bring in new members. This also frees up time for the experienced members to focus on new discussions in the forums - not having to reply to the same questions again.
- Use the email archives to suggest what topics should be addressed and to gather
content - Encourage discussion of wiki content in the forum (e.g., announcements of new
pages, suggestions for what should be added, potential problems with a page) - Establish a norm of linking to specific wiki pages when asking and answering
questions in the forums.
Wiki content
- Include annotated lists of links to resources pertaining to your community.
- Encourage members to consider which wiki genre would meet the needs of the
content the best. Provide examples of pertinent genres. Some useful genres are: - FAQ page
- How-to pages
- Article pages
- Personal experience pages
- Code samples
Establish Wiki related community roles
- Community Wiki Advocates are active community members who can recognize what needs to be added to the Wiki and have the credibility to suggest that others add it.
- Topic experts create and maintain comprehensive article pages, soliciting input from the community, and referencing their page(s) in the forum.
- Librarians organize the content, format it consistently, and delete outdated content and spam.
