Above all, your wiki-gardener needs a sense of ownership.
Ideally the gardener should be involved in the early stages of the wiki project and have a stake in its success. He or she needs to understand the business aims of the wiki, why it is there, what the perceived benefits are, and what the criteria for success are. Your gardener must also be a trusted member of the user community.
In many cases the person responsible for the wiki is the original wiki champion, although in larger organizations this isn’t always possible. It may be that the maintenance of the wiki falls under a different functional department, such as IT, in which case the potential wiki-gardener needs to be invited into the project team as early as possible.
Don’t just appoint a wiki-gardener as if it were just another check list item on the project plan. You need to find a person with both a technology background and an ability to interact with users.
It also helps if you develop a sense of ownership among the contributors or subject matter experts for selected areas of the wiki. Spreading ownership makes maintenance easier.
Ben Allums, Director of Engineering at Quadralay, an Austin, Texas-based software company, has developed what he terms the “tennis ball” theory of wiki ownership, in which he postulates that content without an owner will stay untended in the wiki and will get moved around with no real sense of its inherent value.
The name for his theory comes from a story he tells about how an early employee at the company was a regular tennis player who was in the habit of bringing tubes of tennis balls into the office. At some point one of these tubes of tennis balls ended up in the server room, and there it stayed. Even long after that employee had left the company, people just kept moving the tennis balls around from one shelf or rack to another without ever questioning why they were there in the first place.
In the end the tennis balls survived several server room reconfigurations and even a couple of company relocations. The tennis balls stayed in the company for almost 14 years! Even though they patently had no value or contribution to the function of the server room, no one asked, “why is that there, what is it contributing,” and perhaps more importantly “who owns these tennis balls?”
With wiki content it is vitally important to ask these questions:
At first it would seem logical that the owner of the content should be the person who first contributes the topic or suggests the page, since that person obviously saw a need for that particular piece of information to be added to the wiki. However, this may not always be the case. It may make more sense to set up a page and then hand over ownership to a subject matter expert.
Another skill that the wiki gardener needs to develop is conflict resolution. Due to the collaborative nature of wikis it is possible, although relatively rare, for online conflicts to arise. These can include the following:
The wiki gardener needs to establish protocols for when to step in and resolve conflicting comments and may need to limit how many back and forth edits to allow before investigating. He or she also needs to identify trigger points for when to take conflict resolution off line, talk to the individuals personally, and in extreme cases escalate the issue to a manager.
During a wiki’s growth you may find it necessary to reallocate the ownership of various pages as the structure develops and usage patterns emerge; this is a natural consequence of a wiki’s organic development.
Ownership does not mean that only the designated owner can edit the page; that would defeat the collaborative underpinning of any wiki. However, the designated owner is responsible for the upkeep and monitoring of various pages, leaving the wiki-gardener free to look after the needs of the wiki as a whole.