Do not try and impose a complex hierarchy on the information at first. Start with an open, flat structure that will allow users to develop their own hierarchies as they work with or add content. It will not take long before a natural community-driven navigation model will emerge that reflects the way people actually work and organize information. This community-driven structure will require management and house keeping, which I will discuss in more detail later.
A traditional, imposed structure based on what someone thinks you should be doing, rather than what you actually do, can lead to frustration and is contrary to the open model of a wiki. By its very nature a wiki should reflect the nature and needs of the community.
However there may be instances where the business need calls for a strictly imposed structure, or where the nature of the community is such that it would be happier, at least at the beginning, with some sort of enforced structure. The trick is to balance the needs with the capability of a wiki and the benefits it can bring. The great thing about wikis, is that you can, if necessary, remodel and rearrange the structure to reflect the communities needs and behavior over time.
For many, the basic book paradigm is the most familiar and comfortable organizational method. It seems natural that we should navigate using structured tables of content and indexes. However, this doesn’t reflect the way more “digitally aware” people work.
No matter what progress we make in other areas, when it comes to information sharing and delivery we are still obsessed with old ways of thinking. The advent of digital information delivery, such as wikis and eBooks, is being heralded as a revolution in thinking, but I’d argue that often the technology is just a shiny new package for the same old ideas. We are still locked into a book-based, page-locked paradigm that has changed little since the dawn of the printing press. Today most eBooks are little more than simple electronic page turners, built for, and largely consumed by, tech-savvy, gadget-loving members of the older generation (among which I count myself.)
But this model will not work for the new generation of information consumers.
Those of us raised on more traditional media (i.e. the printed word) are most comfortable with a book paradigm where information comes in a structured format (chapters with headings and sub-headings), and navigation is either a map to that structure (a table of contents), or an alphabetical listing of subjects (an index).
Naturally, when we started to deliver information electronically we carried that paradigm over. Sure we made a few concessions to the new media, but the underlying print-based model stayed, because that’s what we were comfortable with. It’s what we naturally understood, and it matched the way that we handled locating and using written information outside of the work environment.
Helping my teenage daughter with a school project on Pearl Harbor made me realize that the new generation now entering the workforce has a completely different way of accessing information.
To research her project, the first thing she did was go to Google, search for “Pearl Harbor” and start visiting links. Her first stop was Wikipedia.
Then she got on Facebook and YahooIM and started using messaging to ask friends who were online for recommendations. These friends were literally from all around the world, including a family friend in Japan, so she was given access to resources that gave totally different perspectives from those given in the classroom and local school board approved text books. As I watched, she soon had six different windows open on her iMac and was pulling information from multiple sources into her own document, interactively building the structure and narrative as she went.
One friend suggested going to a social bookmarking site and searching using a variety of user-applied tags. Instead of being driven by a pre-defined taxonomy she was now applying a community-derived folksonomy.
Of course being a bibliophile and a bit of a history geek, I had a few good old-fashioned print books on World War II sitting in my home office. I proudly placed them on the edge of my daughter’s desk and suggested she look through them for information on Pearl Harbor, too.
She dutifully picked up a couple of the books and started flicking pages over, skimming through the contents.
“Why don’t you use the Table of Contents or Index?” I asked.
“That just confuses me. I can find stuff quicker this way,” she replied, looking in bemusement at her obviously aged father.
I sat back and watched her navigate the books for a few minutes. She quickly found what she needed – and then I realized what she was doing. She was “browsing” just as if she was online.
That’s when I started to question the paradigm that has informed the way I’ve thought about information delivery for over two decades. The book-driven, structured paradigm may have been ideal for my generation, but what about the new generation?
Since that moment of realization I have continued to watch and learn how people use today’s technology to access information and tried to extrapolate from that what they will expect in the not too distant future.
For kids raised as part of the digital generation, where the first place they go to find out information is the Internet and social networks, the book paradigm is becoming irrelevant. In most cases trying to build a wiki using the book paradigm is not the best approach. Wikis are not designed to be accessed and read in a linear sequential manner, so we shouldn’t set one up based on that model.
Of course, like anything with wikis, there are exceptions, and there will be cases where setting a wiki up to replicate the book model may be the right solution (such as the wiki used to write this book).
If most of the user community is happier finding information via a search, or via categories and tags, then the wiki should reflect that.