Wikis Are a Usability Nightmare; Wikipedia Is Stuck in Monetization
In completing our latest 10-page New Media Life Cycle Analysis — which focuses on Wikis in general, and Wikipedia specifically — we discovered what every non-geek, techno-phobe has always known: wikis are too damn hard to add content on.
Now for many of you who have never contributed to a wiki or have never attempted to edit or amend a Wikipedia entry, this might come as a surprise. But wikis have a lot of growing to do.
Wikipedia: The birth of a medium
Wikipedia stuck in Monetization Phase
Wikipedia has been around for more than eight years, and the first wiki was actually launched in 1994. However, the concept of crowd-sourcing a large volume of credible content (the cornerstone of a wiki) didn’t become popular until Wikipedia moved into its escalation phase in 2005. Wikipedia had one of the longest escalation phases we’ve seen: more than eighteen months. Now, as Wikipedia struggles with its monetization concept, wikis as a platform struggle with the puzzle — how can organizations best implement, organize and maintain their corporate knowledge base in a wiki format?
Who should read this report?
The New Media Life Cycle reports are designed to help marketing executives, content creators, and even venture capitalists, investors, or technology incubators understand the forces at play on any specific content creation channel, platform, or medium.
If you’re planning to deploy a wiki solution, build a wiki, or even invest in a company that develops wikis, this New Media Life Cycle analysis should help.
Download a copy of the Wiki New Media Life Cycle Analysis.
Wikis & Wikipedia New Media Life Cycle Analysis
About the author
Andrew Davis -
In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.
Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.
When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.
He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.
"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."Popular Posts
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Thanks for the excellent report Drew.
I didn’t see any mention of Confluence wiki (http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/) in your report. Have you done any evaluations on Enterprise wiki’s?
Dave,
I just spent an hour or so with confluence. It’s really nice actually and most importantly their search seems to be really good.
I’m going to try it for thirty days and I’ll let you know what happens!
Thanks,
Drew
Dave,
Thanks so much for reading this stuff! I can’t believe you consume our content!
As for Confluence I have heard of it, but never tried it. I’ll sign up for the 30 day free trial!
How’s the UI?
Do you use it?
I’ll sign up tonight.
Thanks again for reading!
Hey Drew!
Thanks for the great content.
We used Confluence at Business Objects as other wiki solutions did not scale well to the Enterprise.
We particularly liked how it handled multiple users concurrently editing the same content with the ability to merge changes. It also supports LDAP so you don’t need to provide creds. It grabs them from AD for a great single-sign on experience.
We’re using Sharepoint 2007 at my new workplace but Sharepoint’s wiki solution falls over. I can never get the formatting right using their rich text editing controls so I always end up copying the content to MS Word, editing it in Word and then copying-n-pasting back into the Sharepoint wiki editor. lame!
We are in the process of deploying Confluence at my new workplace. In addition, we will be installing Confluence’s Sharepoint Connector as well to allow seamless integration between Sharepoint and Confluence so it doesn’t really matter where your content is housed. The Search functionality finds results across Sharepoint & Confluence regardless if you are searching from Sharepoint or searching from Confluence. You can also embed Sharepoint content in Confluence wiki pages and visa versa. Check out this great little video on the integration: http://www.atlassian.com/sharepoint/
cheers,
Dave.
Dave,
Thanks for all the insight. We don’t use Sharepoint (because we new it was a big #Fail.) :)
I’m enjoying confluence, one of the problems is porting all the old content – like you said.
I’ll keep you up to date.
Cheers right back at ya,
Drew
We want to implement a very user friendly wiki solution at our agency. (And inexpensive if possible.) I came across Springnote,http://www.springnote.com/ orginated in Korea, but has English version.
It’s a great little product. FREE, and to you r point about learning curve, so easy to use, which is why i want to go ahead and use it. My biggest concern is that it’s web-based and FREE, so I’m not sure if it will stay in business. If we are using it and it goes away, we’re SOL. Do you know anything about Springnote?