Wikis: It’s All About Fear

3 stages that you go through when wikis come into your organisation: This is a great blog post that addresses what I think is one of the biggest barriers to adoption for wikis in the enterprise: the fear factor.

Enterprises fear egalitarianism. When you say “intranet,” most managers think “top down news system from which I can push information from on high.” The wiki turns this idea on its head

[…] a wiki is also a website with an accessible/open to all Content Management System CMS that generates instantly publishable web pages. The power of content authorship moves from the few to the many.

This is scary.

This is, strangely, more scary for the many than the few. The few are so glad that they are no longer the bottleneck and that a truck load of work is lifted off their shoulders and they can get on with their real work such as designing stuff, generating top notch content and being writers not cut-n-pasters.

The three stages are:

  1. “They are responsible for it all”

  2. “Everyone else is responsible for everything”

  3. “I am responsible for what I know”

I maintain that fear which be the biggest problem you have to tackle when trying to push a wiki at your company.

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