How do you encourage contributors on your intranet TWiki site? Seems like this is a key issue for most TWikis, and important to the TWiki becoming a tool that is really used widely in a company.
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RichardDonkin - 22 Jul 2001
Peter has a Twiki slideshow that discusses this - you need a key knowledge person (a
WikiWonka?

who can begin populating stuff -- almost acting like a webmaster initially. I had a team of 5 people doing that for a major telecomm company. We are now starting to see other people contribute to the various webs that we established.
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DavidWeller - 22 Jul 2001
Acting as a webmaster
initially is a good idea. So others could
ring you up and ask some questions about the contents of some topics.
But if they want you to change some contents, you say
"oh, it's not my page, it's our page. Please try to change it in your browser and I'll help you..."
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StefanScherer - 23 Jul 2001
Add an
AskQuestions topic. In that topic have a paragraph or two about how to ask questions or answer questions that the visitor might know the answer to. That might help get the ball rolling. I think the original
Wiki
might have some information on how to spark a wiki community too.
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DavidLeBlanc - 24 Jul 2001
Q for
DavidWeller - how long did your team act as webmasters before you got other people contributing? A rough idea of how many webs and how big they were would be helpful.
We are currently on two webs, both with 170 topics (strangely enough), one with 20,000 words and the other with 75,000 words. (There are two more prototype webs using the
FormTemplateSystem.) Most content comes from a handful of people, but the readership of these sites is much higher. Since we already have an active set of
NewsGroups, there are no
ThreadMode discussion topics on this site, through there are some thread-mode topics where people add hints and tips. Most topics are
DocumentMode, which I suspect inhibits some people from adding things since the page 'looks finished' even when it really isn't.
Any ideas on how to encourage changes to document-mode pages are welcome.
Also, ideas on the usefulness of training courses would be appreciated. Have you tried delivering stand-up or informal training at all?
Re the AskQuestions topic - I did put up an empty ProductFAQ topic but have yet to see anyone asking questions there, perhaps because there weren't enough people on the
WebNotify list.
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RichardDonkin - 24 Jul 2001
Training courses were discussed at
HowToGetInternalBuyInForTWiki (and possible at other places).
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PeterMasiar - 15 Feb 2002