Working With MediaWiki

important, for explaining the purpose of the wiki, linking to the major sections, and pointing to where users can add additional data.
    There’s all sorts of other advice out there in books and websites for increasing wiki contributions, both in MediaWiki and otherwise. That advice includes contacting people after their first edit to the wiki (on their talk page, or, if the software doesn’t include talk pages, via email) to welcome them; creating contests to reward people for the most or best edits; creating merchandise, like stickers, to promote the wiki (which can in theory be done for private wikis as well as public ones); etc. Other than the first one, we’ve never seen these done for a wiki, so we can’t comment on how useful they are. But they all seem secondary compared to two things: having a clear rationale for why people should read and contribute to the wiki, and having an easy (and ideally form-based) way to edit the pages.
    As to the first idea, though, of welcoming users with a message on their talk page: it’s a popular approach, done on Wikipedia along with many other wikis, but there’s some evidence to suggest that it’s not effective: a study by the Wikimedia Foundation, presented at the Wikimania 2011 conference, found that Wikipedia users who got a welcome message when they first signed up actually had a lower editing rate than those who did not. Did some users feel patronized by the welcome message? Or was this just statistical randomness? In any case, the evidence is inconclusive that personalized welcomes are helpful.
    Now, let’s get to some specific tips for the different kinds of wikis.

Private wikis
    To get usage on a private wiki, like an internal wiki for a company, is of course different from for a public, general-user wiki, but not as different as you might think. On a private wiki you have a captive user base, and users who in some cases may be required by a company directive to contribute to the wiki; so getting people to edit the wiki might seem to be easier. On the other hand, if users find the interface confusing, or decide they prefer their old way of communication (which may involve emailing Word and Excel files back and forth, or putting such files on a shared network drive), then the wiki may just die quickly. We’ve certainly heard of that happening, company directives or no.
    The previous advice on making the wiki user-friendly definitely applies here. Beyond that, it may help to arrange meetings for staff, to give demonstrations of the technology and to let people try it for themselves in a context where they can ask questions and get help.
    At heart, though, getting the users to switch to using the wiki in place of whatever they were using before is just an example of the strange alchemy required to get people to adopt a new technology. It could be that tactics like handing out prizes, distributing stickers to advertise the wiki, and the like are helpful; we’ve never seen them in use, so we don’t know.

Public, organizational wikis
    Finally, there are the wikis that are public, but are specific to one organization: one example is a wiki meant to be used by the local chapters of a non-profit organization, and another is a wiki of documentation for the software produced by some company. Such wikis combine elements of both private and public wikis: like public wikis, the aim is to reach a large and distributed audience, but like with private wikis, people are using the wiki in furtherance of work-related goals, not as a goal in itself.
    These sorts of public, organizational wikis might actually be the easiest to get readers and contributors for. That’s because there’s usually no alternative to it. For a standard public wiki, you’re competing against every other relevant data source on the web, including Wikipedia. For a private wiki, you’re competing against the previous methods people used to store and collaborate on information, most likely including email. But for a distributed community that needs to exchange information, there’s likely no way to do it other than the centralized tool(s) that are given to people. So if a wiki is the available tool, and it’s clearly explained how they should use it, chances are that they’ll use it.
    Still, setting up forms wouldn’t hurt.

Afterword: Onsemantic wikis
    I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this book, and that it will serve as a useful guide for MediaWiki, which in my opinion is, all things