another wish list item for sharepoint wikis

or any wiki for that matter, but since i'm using the sharepoint wiki at this point ...

my sense is that in a business environment folks are reluctant to develop an idea or an argument or the beginnings of a whitepaper etc etc on a wiki page. this process involves one person putting the base writing down and then the team evolves this idea by editing this text, adding to it, taking away from it. i think the problem with this is that it's not clear who contributed what. maybe the wikipedia experience counters this argument but good bad or indifferent that's what i suspect sometimes work against the successful adoption of a wiki in certain environments.

what would improve it to my mind would be the addition of a mechanism that ensures recognition for individual contributors and allows major contributors to better track what is happening to their handiwork.

this mechanism might take the form of first of all listing all the contributors somewhere on the page containing the wiki page. by clicking on any of the author ids it should be possible to easily see the contributions made by that user to what is currently on the wiki page. it could literally take the shape of uniquely identifying each word and punctuation mark that author contributed.

with the mechanism it must also be possible to see what i'd refer to as inline history. instead of having to compare the current page with a previous page, allow any contributor to basically click on 'play' and to see how the document evolved over time, with their own contributions marked in an easily identifiable way.

the beauty of blogs is that they are a way for authors to receive recognition for their contributions. the disadvantage in a knowledge accumulation and evolvement environment is that there are other mechanisms that are more suited to this purpose - like wikis. by adding mechanisms to wikis that allow one to easily see the contributions made by individual authors, the problem of invisible recognition can be solved and therewith - in my view - at least one of the problems with wiki adoption.

disclaimer: this is not a reflection of what is happening with my own organization's adoption of a wiki platform. the idea arose from a desire i myself have to be able to see how a wiki page evolved over time by being able to simulate how the document changed - effectively by clicking on a play button video style, with me being able to alter the speed at which the various versions of the page are shown.

Comments

[Carel Bekker]

Hi Leendert,
I really enjoy your blog -- thanks. This may be too primitive for you, however Google Docs has some good collaboration capabilities. What about http://www.mindmeister.com/ as a collaboration tool. These are not wikis, however they may be good ways to collaborate and give recognition to the different collaborators.

--Carel.