Wiki Patterns
grow your wiki
EditLeech
What is it?
A leech takes content out of the wiki and sends it to people another way, usually by email. This reduces peoples' inclination to visit it, and potentially creates confusion because information is coming from multiple sources.
How do I notice it?
Look for email or websites or powerpoint files with content that's been taken from wiki pages but not referenced as such with appropriate URLs.
How do I fix it?
- Talk to the leech about the importance of keeping content associated with the wiki. Suggest that instead of taking content from the wiki and presenting it in a different forum, s/he might just email people with a link to content on the wiki. Convert them to a Spectator.
- (Caution, this may been seen as confrontational in some cultures) - Follow-up any broadcast of wiki-originated information with a broadcast of your own indicating where the information came from, indicating something like, "And if you want to have the most up-to-date version of this information, remember to check: ....".
| Rate this pattern? |
|
Related Patterns
- Champion - a champion will watch for leeching and talk with people about the importance of keeping content on the wiki to build its value.
- WikiGnome - a WikiGnome constantly works to improve the quality of content on the wiki, thus making it the best possible place to collaborate.
- Magnet - this pattern involves putting content exclusively on the wiki as a way to build its value.
- A Spectator is very similar to a leech, in that they are strictly information consumers on your wiki. However, spectator does not extract information to 'dilute' the value of the wiki, and can more easily be converted into an Ambassador
Further Reading
Adoption Patterns
Adoption Anti-Patterns
Wikipatterns.com is sponsored by Atlassian Software, creators of JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo and Crowd
Designed by Headshift Ltd
Is the pattern truly one of removing content from the wiki? Or is it more a copy and paste behavior? I'm guessing it's the latter, because I doubt that such a person would take the time to actually edit the wiki content. If my guess is right, this description could stand clarification.
To nuance this alittle, the article Intellipedia suffers midlife crisis
, 2/18/2009 describes behavior more like harvesting and transplanting from a wiki into pre-existing information systems.
Following the Rogers adoption curve here... Innovators, early-adopter, and perhaps early-majority-types have built up a critical mass of material and activity, then others who are more comfortable with previous or local systems copy and paste from the wiki back into their own preferred system, which someone trying to build across organizations (i.e., wiki person) might view as more narrow, provincial, parochial, insular, etc.
The person quoted in this article says after a certain amount of bottom-up work, it's time for a top-down, management directive to switch to the wiki.