How can I ensure they will come?

Build it and they will come? Maybe so, but maybe not. One of the challenges in managing an active wiki is getting people involved – and not in just reading, but in contributing to its content.

Here are some suggestions to getting like-minded people involved on the wiki with you:

1. Post a message on a relevant forum
2. Link to your wiki from relevant newsgroups and message boards
3. Find those who are blogging about your topic and post a comment referencing your wiki
4. Place a campaign for assistance on a relevant Talk Page on other related wikis
5. Work with your wiki host to ensure the code it’s generating is search engine friendly so that it will be found easily
6. Submit your URL to search engines
7. Create relevant tags for the wiki content
8. Volunteer to speak at a local meeting of a club or association related to your topic
9. Put your wiki’s URL in your e-mail signature
10. Ask others who are hosting websites related to your topic to consider posting a link to your site and you, in turn, add a link to theirs on yours
11. In your organization, select a wiki champion, who is knowledgeable about wikis, will be an advocate of wikis as a best practice in collaboration, and will coach employees

Do you have other suggestions? Start a thread on this page and give us your feedback.

Here's a video by Stewart Mader on how to grow wiki adoption:

As posted on YouTube by slmader


Check out Stewart Mader's 21 Days of Wiki Adoption, where over the course of 21 days he posted a number of videocasts with helpful tips on how to successfully deploy wikis within the enterprise. You can view the videocasts on this page: