In his excellent book Wikipatterns[Mader07], leading wiki evangelist and consultant Stewart Mader describes how observed, repeated methods of behavior can be described as “wikipatterns.” On the Wikipatterns website[Wikipatterns], these behaviors are grouped as either people patterns or adoption patterns (remember what I said about wiki adoption being as much a sociology exercise as a technical one?).
At the time of writing there are over sixty different wikipatterns listed on the website. Each wikipattern has its own wiki page, which includes the following information:
It is well worth familiarizing yourself with these wikipatterns so that you will be able to recognize and predict them.
You should also familiarize yourself with wiki anti-patterns, that is, behavior that is detrimental to the usage and growth of the wiki. Examples include Wikiphobia, Over Organizer, Design By Committee, Too Much Structure, etc. Many of these are also listed on wikipatterns.com.
When it comes to landscaping your wiki, focus on the wikipatterns for navigation and organizing content. By observing the way that people place content on the wiki, or navigate around it, you will be able to determine where to locate content, or how to set up navigation techniques that work for your community. You may need to set up a combination of wikipatterns and navigation techniques.
I have seen one software company wiki that successfully combines three different navigation techniques, each designed to meet the needs of one part of the company’s diverse customer base:
For instance, users are considerably less likely to create labels such as “airplane,” “aeroplane,” “plane,” “planes,” etc., if there is already a clearly defined label of “aircraft” available to use. These category tags can then be used to create visual navigation aids such as tag clouds or to generate a “related pages” list of all the other pages labeled with the same tag.