What motivates people to contribute to documentation projects for free? Is the documentation actually free as in no-cost? I’ll speak from my own experience and draw from recent research in this area. Plus, I just read Chris Anderson’s excellent essay on free as a business model and learned about the multiple economies and values and currencies available to us today such as the gift economy or labor exchange.
In my Wiki-fy your doc set presentation, I talk about the motivations for people contributing to any online or community documentation, and these four categories apply for any online community, be it a wiki or a mailing list:
reciprocity
reputation
efficacy
feeling like you belong or identify with a group or cause.
These four categories explain why people are motivated to contribute for no pay (for free) to a documentation project. This poster presentation for a “General Online Research” conference 2008, GOR 08, offers even more insight into contributions to Wikipedia as well as reasons people cite for not contributing content but reading only. Now, I agree with Stewart Mader that “your (enterprise) wiki is not Wikipedia” but there are lessons to be learned from Wikipedia as well. Take a look at what they found motivated contributors:
Rank Motive
3.71 Free access to knowledge for everyone
5.15 Task enjoyment / Fun
5.33 Learning
6.55 Belief in the future of Wikipedia
6.69 Existing information was inaccurate
7.25 Quality improvement of Wikipedia
At the unconference last week, Tom Johnson asked me, why did you get started with documenting the OLPC project? My initial motivation was that someone who I used to work for asked me, and he works for Joann Hackos. So reputation was one motivating factor, but as I read more and more about the education goals of the OLPC project on laptop.org, the more I saw it as an opportunity to identify with an education cause especially as related to my own kids computer educations and expanding their horizons beyond Windows. Why are any of us interested in documenting a complex product or process? It’s possible that at the heart of our motivation is recognition or reward in terms of money or success. But, an underlying motivator for many technical writers is that we like to help others learn, which ties into my education motives. We may also think that writing and communicating with images, audio, or video is a great way to make a living. What I am observing more lately is that community members want to write or share content as well.
Last year, O’Reilly ran a survey asking about the motivations that people have for contributing to online documentation, be it via a forum, a mailing list, or a web site. With 354 responses, I’m sure there’s a wide variety of answers, but certainly some patterns emerged. Andy Oram dissects them in a five plus page article. My favorite line on the first page is “And while fixes to particular errors are easy to convey, best practices are not.”
His report contains many findings that are unique, because no one else had been asking the questions. What he found that surprised me was:
People surveyed don’t think they are contributing to the documentation
People surveyed didn’t think of themselves as writers
Indeed, community building is the more important ranked reason for contributing to online documentation, rather than personal growth.
I have seen that rather than the monetary gains you can make by freelancing documentation, the currency of community is a payment schedule all on its own right.
The “free” offerings represent a shift in thinking. It’s not that no one paid for the doc to receive it. Nor did anyone get paid to write it. But the infrastructure in place enabled a sense of free-ness, freedom, and lack of cost. In reality, an elite group of people who have computers (starting at US$600 or so) and pay US$40 a month for Internet connections trade in t their time and knowledge in hopes of getting repaid in time and knowledge, recognition, a sense of belonging, or a payback in time by being more efficient.
This shift represents a new economy for documentation. Payment is in a different, “free,” no monetary cost form.
Here are my notes from Darren Barefoot’s talk, a self-described recovering technical writer.
He leads with what defines social media? Create your own definition around these concepts:
Conversation - comments on large media sites allow ayone to speak to the media person keeping on the pedestal
Collaboration - 7 million people collaborating on wikipedia, likely the largest collaboration in human history
Sharing - some sort of microbroadcasting is built into every type of website
Scope - there are no longer 42-minute hours on televisions. Your buckets of stuff and time are sliced and diced. Ebooks can be 10 pages to 1000 pages.
Community - constructing affinity groups is easy, accessible
Transparency - blogging encourages transparency - medium is the message
Authenticity - example of knowing it’s fake is fakeSteveJobs.com, Lonelygirl15 is an example of outed fakery
42% of Chinese internet users have a blog
“The people formerly known as the audience”
Survey of 1200 bloggers - why do you create content, do social media? Talk to friends and family first, Keep personal history, Emote top three. But make money bottom response.
An excellent, engaging talk, with the conclusion being, there’s no way to relinquish control, it is already too late.
Here are the takeaways he left us with:
Relinquish control - realize that the best documentation for your product is already not on your website.
Users will help each other - put screenshots in Flickr to make it easy for your users to grab them and use them in their own doc
Empower your most passionate users - for example, the Red Room Chronicles created by a Marriot business traveller. He must be the most passionate hotel user known. Offer those users previews, invite them to focus groups, make them feel special.
Think outside the page - Twitter troubleshooting tips, and of course, remember video and photos.
Go where your users are - find their community spaces, be present as needed.
Bob Glushko blogs at docordie.blogspot.com, great blog name and a fascinating presentation. I liked that he shared and described his semi-retirement as verbalizing his desire to be a beach bum to his wife, but his wife said, I still like my job and I want to work, so go get a job! He has been teaching at UC Berkley ever since.
Building information supply chains - example of the E. Coli scare in lettuce in March 2007. Basically had to figure out how to track heads of lettuce, similar to tracking heads of people to avoid long lines at security in the airport. With enough data tracking - input and retrievability - you can make informed decisions.
Common themes of new information services - document exchange, patterns, similar to supply chains and distribution channels. There are hidden documents in business processes.
His “ah-ha” moment? he had always focused on the document, but with ordering on the web, his user experience is what really matters - did the business process work? Did the lobsters arrive dead or alive? Did his shipment get to him in time and was it the right order? You have to know the back-end, the time difference, the travel distance, the choreography and design of the pattern determines success and a happy user experience.
I’m reminded of the fact that there are 39 time zones in the world, and for collaboration across the world, we have to figure out the time zone difference relative to the person you want to collaborate with.
Bob offers an excellent analogy for wiki-based, community-collaborative content - a restaurant’s lines of visibility. At McDonalds, you have backstage production lines for food prep, at Benihana you have food prep as part of the entertainment right at your table (remeber that onion volcano so expertly prepared?) We should try to strategically determine where to draw our lines of visibility - what point of view do we wish to present to our users?
Ah, now he’s talking about a cooking school where the kitchen is the front stage for the cooks, and the back stage for the customers. A restaurant’s dining room is the front stage for the customers, but the back stage for the cooks. I’m reminded of a webpage I read where people proved that writing on a wiki actually helps you learn more about the tasks because you have to figure out your conceptual understanding of the task to write about it. If you allow more writing to happen next to the backstage when it’s the cooks in the kitchen, or the expert writers in the wiki, more beginners can learn by not observing or reading but by actually participating in the writing itself.
While you may have identified more with either the front end or back end design issues, you can choreograph the information experience for the user.
Here are Bob’s slides, also found on slideshare.net.
While gearing up for different conference trips and presentations, I’ve been trying to get to know collaborators using asynchronous communications, such as listening to Char James-Tanny’s podcast on techwritervoices.com. She presented “Virtual Ways of Communicating” at a Florida STC meeting and Tom Johnson recorded it and posted it later.
I really enjoyed not only listening to Char speak but also hear the audience questions and interactions. For example, when she showed tag clouds, one audience member asked, does the size and format of the tag words change when a tag is used more often than another? And I thought, wow, I’ve always assumed that is exactly how it works, but haven’t actually asked the question, such as refresh rate or what relative sizing means. It points out to me that I take a lot for granted in the Web 2.0 world due to observing so much of it so often. But, a new fresh perspective offers me the conceptual details that people would seek when first exposed to something like a tag cloud.
As part of listening to this podcast, I found many suggestions for cool videos, popular wikis, and new uses of RSS such as RSS that I hadn’t heard yet. I realize that no matter how hard I try to keep up, there are new applications of technology coming in every day. I thought I’d collect these together though as a nice collection of “have you seen this?” which may not make much sense unless you listen to the podcast, but these were enjoyable to hear about and explore on my own.
I just put the finishing touches on our Wiki Roundtripping presentation and I have to admit I’m a little excited about it. While much of the focus will be on the DITA-Wiki Hybrid scenarios, there are at least two new scenarios that I’ve learned about since writing that white paper that we’ll bring to the presentation.
The Meet the Bloggers session is apparently going to be popular, so I hope I can pull off the moderator role effectively. I’m no Oprah, but I do come from Cincinnati where Jerry Springer was once mayor. This session will be fun and I expect to learn from Tom Johnson, Scott Abel, Darren Barefoot, Scott Nesbitt, and Aaron Davis.
Plus, I’m excited for the Unconference sessions Wednesday night. Completely experimental, but this conference seems like a great place to try out some different ways of sharing information off-the-cuff and informally.
An interesting read on the front page of wordpress.com of all places. I enjoy random clicking, and this one came up with a great commentary on the difficulty of using a wiki to get how to information.
Over at SL, the main source of information is on the WIKI, which in my opinion has some great information but because Linden primarily lets the users run the show isn’t as helpful as some sort of information clearing house. Trying to sort out how to sculpt, for example, is an exercise in total frustration. There are some wonderful tutorials, but SL does nothing to properly aggregate and put these tutorials into context.
I wonder what Second Life could do to properly aggregate those tutorials to meet this user’s needs? I suppose long-time wiki writers would answer: use categories and encourage tagging, while looking out for orphans. Any other ideas?
I got a great question from Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing:
I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on the WordPress Codex, http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page. Yesterday I was looking at this Codex wondering what to make of it all. I think I want to be a contributor, but there are so many topics. It’s chaotic. The organization is like a maize. I don’t know if I should go in there with a wrecking ball and rennovate, or not. Probably 25% of it is outdated. What happens to those outdated pages? Will I offend people if I just delete things that are outdated?
Can you recommend a book or strategy for making sense of massive wikis? Where should I start? I spent a good hour editing a page of it last night that I considered critical. It’s then that I realized this is a huge project and I have no sense of direction. Any insight you can give me would be much appreciated.
With the OLPC wiki, David Farning on the Library list went through the wiki and said he found these categories. It’s quite an accurate content analysis from what I’ve seen, so I was impressed. At the same time, it also helped explain my initial wonderment at how to wrap my arms around the entire wiki - and in fact, it is barely possible to do.
Once David came up with these categories, he then asked SJ Klein, director of community content and long-time Wikipedian, if he thought the wiki needed structure.
SJ said that the wiki is purposefully without hierarchy - flat, especially for projects, to not force a parent or sibling sense for projects. He also said, however, if you have a specific tree hierarchy in mind, feel free to develop the idea in some temporary space.
So, when working on a large wiki if you have good organization ideas, set them up, and then ask for community feedback. Seems like an appropriate approach to a large wiki.
Other ideas for starting out in a large wiki environment:
While it might seem like it’s a question similar to “how do I get started on a huge writing project?” in my experience, wiki editing has some subtleties due to the collaboration and community vibe already present behind the pages. You have to work harder to figure out that vibe, and then determine your course.
For new people, there’s the whole question of getting a feel for the community so you can start to answer “who am I going to potentially irritate by editing this” and “as a newbie do I have the confidence I’m right?”
So, knowing your role within the wiki community is a first step. You might take a while to get to know who’s there, what their roles are as well, and where you might best fit in. Introduce yourself with your profile page, following the WikiPattern, MySpace - see http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/MySpace.
Just like a newbie on a writing team, find out if there’s some scut work that you can do to get your feet wet, if needed, to gain the community’s trust.
Deletions are going to bring much more wrath in a wiki situation, I would guess, so they seem risky to do to start out. If you do think something needs deletion, message or email the original author or the big contributors and ask if it’s okay to mark it for deletion. Then, mark it, and hope that someone else (a wiki admin) determines if it should be deleted.
Start small, like tagging, or applying templates. That’ll help you get a feel for the bigger picture.
Let us know your ideas for wrapping your head around a large wiki, we’d love to hear them.
I’ve listened to about the first 45 minutes of Clay Shirky’s talk on “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.” http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/02/shirky. Well worth the time spent – especially for my current employer’s product set, which enables organizations to manage their data used to communicate with and connect their members with each other through event planning - all the goals that associations and non-profits strive for every day.
Before the web, it would have easily taken five to seven years to build up the community - starting from the time when a professional photographer figured out the technique, to the time when ordinary people having the knowledge to accomplish HDR. Using Flickr, it took three months to build a community of practice, because when a photo goes up, people talk with each other, ask how photos were done, and examine the photo examples to learn. In this case, the technology became a platform where people help one another get better.
This group has no commercial incentive whatsoever, as a side note.
The community is as important as the content, a humbling thought for us writers. Just like the Architecture of Participation that Tim O’Reilly talked about in 2004, the participation of community members to generate and test content is as key as the content itself. He even states, “the fundamental architecture of hyperlinking ensures that the value of the web is created by its users.” Google Page Rank further adds to the value by including inbound links in its ranking algorithm.
15% of people are from the northeast 15% of people left handed 15% of people in the world have no cell phone, or no Internet
And… less than 15% of computer science majors are female. [1]
This was the lead-in for the panelists and I liked the tie-ins of 15.
Since this session, I have talked to girls around the 12-15 year old range, and I completely agree with all the panelist’s observations about how girls don’t think they’re good at something, especially computers.
In this session I met Ashe Dryden and we talked about BarCamp Austin - she’s an organizer for BarCamp Milwaukee. I asked her to watch my laptop while I got a “pop” and offered to get her one too. I laughed when she asked upon my return, “Where are you from, if you say ‘pop!’” I have lived in Austin seven years, but haven’t let go of my Midwestern roots (Indiana and Ohio), where we say pop for all kinds of soda, pop, soda pop, Coke, and fizzy drink.
After the session I spoke to Clare Richardson of GirlStart about how the Austin XO user group would like to help out with their projects. One that’s upcoming is the Take IT Global showcase, where they’re working on games for the OLPC project. It sounds like they have enough XOs for their upcoming event, April 26th, which I plan to attend. They’re going to show off the educational game projects that the girls in the GirlStart program have been programming. They’re using a wiki to keep notes, collaborate, do project planning, all for the work they’re doing on their games. It’s great fun to read the game ideas.
Here are my notes from the session.
Clare Richardson - GirlStart in Austin, TX
What class in middle school did you feel smart and confident in?
art, phys ed, math, computer lab?
TechBridge
Free afterschool programs and summer programs.
Role models are key, role model training. Great training document available on their website. I plan to read through it for ideas on taking the XO to classrooms.
Jay Moore MentorNet
Email connection with mentors, 10-15 minutes a week.
Abby Tittizer IBM Extreme Blue
Internship program, not specific to women, for college students.
Q: What are the common misconceptions about girls and technology and getting them interested?
A: Perception is boring and nerdy and you have to already be good at it. Girls have altruistic missions.
Girls don’t think they’re qualified to do something, but boys “just go for it.” girls think that an internship means they already need to know how to do it.
Suggestions:
Have girls sign up in pairs for a computer class.
Spend time with your kids teachers and guidance counselors to find out more about their science education, etc.
Boys tend to have an inflated sense of their own competence.
UT has a club that has a roadshow that goes out to TX high schools to help recruit.
They use pair programming in introductory classes.
Updated to add: There’s a great article in the NYTimes that I found through Anne Zelenka’s del.icio.us links called “Sorry, Boys, This is our Domain.” While girls might not be computer science majors, they are excellent bloggers and customizers of all sorts of web and social sites. Quote: “…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).” Girls may have more patience and perseverance to stick to a site that requires content updates.
A response to the question, Wiki-to-Help? on the Help Authoring Tool Yahoo Group.
One of our test engineers (and the lead developer of our company wiki) just approached me with the idea of using our company’s internal wiki as the central repository for all company material and using it to generate online help.
I’m following the discussion with interest. I, too, had a similar question asked of me from a developer when we were working in an Agile development environment at BMC Software. In that case, which was at least three years ago, the matchup between the wiki HTML output and the HTML output I needed for our particular help system just wasn’t a good fit. But today, there are better pairings, input to output. I think it’s feasible to go from a wiki to an online help system. It really depends on what output you need, and what you’re willing to do to ensure that the wiki source is worthy of publishing (tested, vetted, trusted, and so on).
I’ve been working on wikis as source for manuals, where the output is a PDF file. In general, yes, wikis are a little clumsy to work in for authoring. For example, some wikitext doesn’t understand that you want a numbered step list with images in between each step and that you want the numbering to continue after each image. So if you’re accustomed to a nice HTML authoring interface, a wiki authoring interface will “feel” like a step about 10 years back in time.
On the more interesting issue, the cultural issue (or the career issue, depending on how you think about it), I think the basis of most arguments against using wikis as source is the fear of loss of authoring control. See wikipatterns.com for the many anti-people patterns that wikis tend to foster if you don’t take steps to avoid them. I especially liked one of the responder’s comments to the list that he didn’t want to become an editor for a wiki. I think he’s right - that “magazine editor” is one of the roles you could take as a wiki-based author. You could also consider your role to be “community director” if you think you can motivate others to contribute to your wiki that will eventually be the help system. There are different roles that will evolve, and it’s up to you to figure out what role might work well in your environment (or if it would work at all). I wrote up a blog post last week about determining where your role as technical writer is most valued in the company, and building from that role.
I believe the cultural or social difficulties are the more difficult hurdle - you have to ensure that the community surrounding a wiki (those that can and will edit) is a group that is willing to work together and collaborate towards the common goal of publishing a customer-facing help system from the wiki. In a SXSW Interactive session titled “Edit Me! How Gamers are Adopting the Wiki Way” one panelist said that a core group of five editors on a wiki may be the best practice for the size of the group. This type of small number is represented and described in the 90-9-1 theory on wikipatterns.
A solution that might help you wrap your arms around the wiki as source is to set aside only one area or category of the wiki as the articles from which the online help gets generated. Again, without knowing the wiki engine you’re working with and the types of output you’d require, it’s difficult to know if a “wikislice” solution could help in your situation.
Anyway, I could go on and on (and I believe I just did go on and on) about using wikis as source for end-user documentation. I’m pleased that Sarah O’Keefe has just published a white paper titled “Friend or Foe? Web 2.0 in Technical Communication” that should be helpful as we begin to define our roles in each company and how we integrate user-generated content with our own on our product’s web sites.
I hope this information can help you build an argument for or against the use of wikis as source for online help. Please let me know the eventual outcome, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on my response.
I’m pleased that the Building a DITA-Wiki Hybrid article that I co-authored with Lisa Dyer and Michael Priestly is available online for free to anyone, STC member or non-member. The article discusses these three ideas for merging DITA and wiki technologies:
DITA Storm, an online DITA editor with an edit button on each page. While it’s not quite a DITA wiki, it seems like it could become one with some RSS notification and comment or discussion ability on each page.
Wikislices are a cross-section of a wiki such as Wikipedia, currently created with school curriculum in mind. Michael Priestly and I are working on a team to find ways to use DITA maps to manage and build wikislices.
Anne is a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions International. Read 
