Wikis For Non-Technical Users

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how to make wikis accessible to the common man – in other words, how do we get wikis to spread out of the technical departments and make it not just usable by non-technical people but make them actually want to use it and advocate it. Certainly there’s been a lot of movement in this area and a lot of good progress made, but I suspect there’s a lot more than can be done.

Certainly at Ephox, we seen the operations, sales and marketing people make heavy use of our internal wiki – I tend to attribute that to a couple of reasons:

1. We configured the wiki to use HTML. While the technical people don’t tend to leverage this that much, the sales, marketing and operations people regularly build well laid out pages with tables and columns etc. There’s summary boxes for quick overviews and graphics to highlight points etc. Some of it could be done with wiki markup but most couldn’t. Many people think this increased flexibility in presentation distracts people from the content, in fact it’s quite the opposite. It provides ways to highlight information, to design the page so it’s most useful for readers and to make navigation much easier.
2. We have a great WYSIWYG editor so people didn’t have to learn any kind of markup. You can still switch to code view to tweak things by hand if you want, and people do, but by default you can just get to writing your content and laying it out how you want without having to think about the rules of HTML or wiki markup.

I think it’s the combination of the two of those things that made a real difference to us. HTML by itself would be too hard to edit. A WYSIWYG editor for wiki markup distracts from the content without providing the flexibility to really lay out the content in a way that helps the reader. A lot of wikis these days seem to be falling into this second trap – their users complained about having to learn wiki markup so they added an editor. Unfortunately, the editor really doesn’t do a lot more than let you type plain paragraphs and headings and insert images more easily. The lack of powerful table support (including nested tables) hugely reduces the ability for users to structure a page the way they want. Using tables for layout may not be exactly up to speed with modern CSS techniques but it’s something that people understand and have been doing in Word for ages so it works.

The trouble is, that’s just one use case in a company that is kind of technical anyway. I know of at least one company that failed to get adoption because of wiki markup but that’s still not a great sample size. I’m really keen to hear other people’s experiences with what made a difference to wiki adoption in all kinds of companies or particularly what caused the wiki to fail. If you’ve got some experience with getting non-technical users to adopt wikis I’d love to hear from you either in the comments below or my email and phone number are just over there on the right.