---
title: "Community and Collaboration (Wikis)"
date: 2012-06-14
description: "My journey to and from wikis   1.0 My Journey To and From Wikis: Why I Adopted Wikis, Why..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2012/06/14/community-and-collaboration-wikis/
---
# Community and Collaboration (Wikis)
The potential reward in collaborating with the masses is an idea that shouldn't be underestimated. Almost everything interesting happening on the web comes about through community. Think of any well-known site. Its innovation isn't the technical features of the platform but rather the community. Wikipedia's genius is the collective contributions of so many different people working on an encyclopedia of all human knowledge. YouTube is a collection of community-contributed videos on virtually every subject. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Craigslist, Pinterest – you name it, all of these sites are popular because of the community, not because of their site design or functionality.

Given that amazing things can happen through community and collaboration, it seems natural to adopt a similar model for documentation. Even on a small scale, if users can contribute just a small fraction of the content they contribute on these popular sites, wouldn't the endeavor be worth it? Certainly. But the real question is how you build a thriving, contributing community.

## Spontaneous versus Directed Edits

One of the first questions to address is how much autonomy you will give to community members. Will you allow them to do anything they want, or will you restrict their contributions to only those actions your company decides to allow?

![Will you allow your users to go in any direction, or just one way?](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/any-direction-versus-one-way600.png)

Giving community members a lot of autonomy can increase their motivation to get involved. For example, with WordPress, a lot of community plugin developers have an itch they want to scratch, so they create plugins to satisfy specific needs they have. That's their motivation. But you may not want your community members creating code that strays outside of your company's direction.

When it comes to content, community members are usually less enthusiastic. If you simply include the ability for community members to edit content, but you don't direct or guide their efforts in any way, chances are they will not make a lot of spontaneous edits without some overriding collaborative purpose. Just adding an edit button in your documentation does little. In fact, I think many people give up on wikis when they find that almost no one edits the content.

If you want community members to more actively write and edit content, you may need to provide more direction. In a presentation at the STC Summit, Sarah Maddox explained that at Atlassian, they do regular doc sprints in which they carefully list out all the topics they need content written about, and then they make a request for people to write those topics. She said that it takes a lot of preparation to identify the topics, but the sprints are relatively successful.

Doc sprints are a popular method for getting community together to write content. I admit that I've never done a doc sprint. I have other methods for interacting with community.

## The Wiki I Work With

The primary site I work with is [LDSTech](https://tech.lds.org/wiki). LDSTech has a [wiki](https://tech.lds.org/wiki), [blog](https://tech.lds.org), and [forum](https://tech.lds.org/forum). One of the site's purposes is to allow community members to contribute their time and talents. LDSTech is a technology site for the [LDS Church](http://lds.org), so the community members are mostly LDS ([Mormon](http://mormon.org)).

According to a [recent study](http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/penn-research-shows-mormons-are-generous-and-active-helping-others), LDS church members contribute about 35 hours per month toward volunteer callings and other efforts. (Yes, that's about eight hours a week!) Providing a community where the more technical members could contribute using their writing and IT talent seems like a natural fit for such a volunteer-oriented community.

The LDSTech site has about 30 different projects that members can get involved in. Most of these projects do not involve writing. Rather, they involve beta testing applications, participating in design brainstorms, developing code for technical solutions, and other technical efforts.