ITM 198a Week 2: Chapters 2 & 3

Reading about the need for top-down control in public wikis (Casarez, et. al, 2009, p. 39) I was reminded of a character from the movie I watched with my kids the other day, City of Ember. Mankind, on the brink of self-annhialation builds a city far underground and locks the inhabitants up for 200 years. Every year the children are assigned jobs, and the energetic hero (who wants to work on the generator because it keeps failing) ends up in pipe-works. There, he meets an old, narcoleptic pipe-worker. Whenever our hero asks him what this or that is for, he always says he doesn’t know, repeating, “that’s not my job.” Of course, at the climax of the movie, when the massive turbine is about to spin out of control destroying the city and all hope of salvation, the old man climbs on top of it, opens a small hatch, and inserts a tool to keep the turbine moving. When the hero asks him, “how do you know you’re supposed to do that?” the old man replies, “it’s my job!” I see the same kind of attitude — or perhaps more of a human or cultural characteristic — at work where people will update the wiki related to their job areas, but shy away from larger changes that cut across other areas of responsibility. While it hasn’t been necessary to set up controls, there has certainly been a need for a small group to take charge of the overall organization of the wiki. There are also other practical concerns to achieve an effective wiki: consistent content layouts (templates) are helpful and usage guidelines can improve usability. One issue we’ve seen is that WikiWords: words with no whitespace between them which automatically become links, are not understood by our search engines. It is therefore a recommended practice to put the properly spaced title in the wiki page so it can be indexed.

Our book has mentioned WYSIWYG editors a couple times now, and I just have to chime in. In my experience WYSIWYG is not workable. Wikis allow users to put a variety of codes (wiki-specific and HTML) in their pages, and WYSIWYG editors simply can’t handle most of these codes. While this is partly a technical problem, in fact, to unleash the full power of wiki editing one simply must invest a bit of time to learn the wiki syntax. One cannot even say, “beginners can use WYSIWYG” because if they edit other people’s pages with a WYSIWYG editor, they will as best be confused, and at worst corrupt the page beyond recognition. Wiki syntax is not that hard (on par with HTML, I’d say), and it’s a small price to pay to take part in the Great Conversation.

In the software engineering department where I work, there is clear value in connecting together the various aspects of our work. We need to unify: code, documentation, designs, help, history, use, plans, problems, projects, and teams. Thus far, URLs and the wiki have been the most effective way to make these kinds of connections, but we are still a long way from the goal of having them all effectively connected. We need to enhance our intranet to include all those elements in a collaborative framework that will empower developers and users to bring about the goal of unifying our operations. The key is, as the book says (p. 54), “making it overwhelmingly simple for users to participate.” Since the =immediate= return to users is nil, it needs to cost nothing. The cumulative gain, however, is of great value.

On page 59 our intrepid authors state, “enterprises are and must be controlled ecosystems with a clearly defined and easily identifiable number of contributors and sources.” I boldly disagree. The authors want to have it both ways: leave enterprise control fully intact while still leveraging the power of crowds. But if an organization is really committed to its user base, they should be willing to listen and adapt, and in fact =be led= by their users. The authors state as much just pages before. The fact is enterprises must be willing to GIVE UP some control by allowing the crowd to have a say. In the end, everyone will be better off. And corporate leaders that don’t believe this won’t be corporate leaders much longer because people will naturally support businesses that give them a voice, and those that don’t will, in due course, fail. The authors may not “argue for a popular uprising and revolution of the workers against The Man”, but the revolution has already come.

References:

Casarez, et. al. (2009). Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0. McGraw Hill.