How Can You Measure a Wiki's Worth? 78
moldar writes "I have been involved in a major project to migrate documentation from multiple sources to a wiki (Media Wiki, if you must know). Now, the PHBs are all asking questions about how organized the data is. I've already googled for various wiki metrics ideas, but mostly they focus on page counts, average page sizes, rates of edits, etc. Can anybody suggest better ways of measuring the quality of a wiki? Things like uncategorized pages, articles that are too small, etc? Any help or fresh ideas would be appreciated."
Similar Situation (Score:5, Informative)
I'm actually in a situation which is very similar to the OP's. The company I work for has a number of training/procedural documents which currently exist in .mht format (of all things), and we're in the process of migrating those documents into the wiki which comes built into MOSS (the latest version of SharePoint). I won't go into detail about how horribly crippled the MOSS wiki is, except to say it is. Anyway, I was asked to write a "Wiki Best Practices" document and I tried to include a few ideas on what makes a successful wiki because I knew the business users were pretty clueless about them (not that I claim to be an expert here). These were some of the points I tried to address:
First and foremost are the users able to find what they are looking for? If they can't find it in the wiki they'll go somewhere else for it, and the wiki will fall on its face.
Is the information accurate? If you're not meeting these two criteria your wiki is probably worthless, and your users will almost certainly resort to another source of information.
Does your wiki exhibit signs of growth? By this I mean new pages/sections/categories being added when new information becomes available, and edits being performed to improve the quality of existing information. I think one of the biggest hurdles companies will have to overcome for this criteria is the fact that there tends to be a very top-down approach to the distribution of new information (This is definitely the case in my company). In order to allow the wiki to grow there must be enough users with create/edit privileges to keep it up to date. The more users there are who are actively involved in the wiki, the more likely it is to be successful. Of course, if management doesn't want to allow the user populace to be able to edit the wiki the task will probably fall to a select few, and they will inevitably become involved in their other tasks at which point the wiki will fall by the wayside and die a quick death. This is the battle I'm currently fighting, and I'm not entirely sure I'll win.
Ask your users what they think. This one is pretty obvious, but easy to overlook if you're doing things like checking page hit counts and sizes. Put together a survey and ask them if they find the wiki to be easier/more useful than the previous method, if it saves them time (and if so how much), and what they think should be done to improve it. Ask them if the information they find is accurate or not. Finally, ask them what they did/didn't like about the previous method, and whether or not that issue has been addressed by the wiki.