just enough content management

a case study in managing user-contributed information on a public

website

Mark Barratt | Text Matters | Information Design Conference 2012

Help people working in voluntary organisations

share their knowledge

In a useful format

With a process that is inclusive and accessible

Including peer review/rating

And peer updating

By making ‘wikiable’ content more usable

Mark Barratt | Text Matters

Politics: helping people work together painlessly

Economics: curation of knowledge is expensive

and time-consuming: anything which may help is

useful


Authority plus comment

Corrections hard to integrate

and attribute

Potentially-important comments

off the visible page


Bulletin board on the web

Appropriate for developing ideas

Useful stuff distributed in a thread

Not useful for reference or how-to articles


Website for people in the voluntary sector

‘Everything and everyone you need to know to run

a nonprofit’

Launched April 2009

5000+ pages of reference and learning material

26,000+ UK registered users


First web

browser/

editor

1990

What’s the

point of just

reading?


First ‘wiki’ 1994

‘...not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors.

Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an

ongoing process of creation and collaboration

that constantly changes the Web site landscape.’

Wikipedia 2001

Not a mass-participation sport

Wikipedia participation rate 0.02%


Wikipedia

WikiHow (and its peers)

Lots of closed & special-interest groups

er, that’s it


Focus on dialogue not co-composition

Email 1971

Bulletin Boards 1978

CompuServe, The Source, 1979

TheGlobe (1995) SixDegrees (1997) failed

Friendster 2002

MySpace 2003

Facebook 2004

Twitter 2006


Nothing fatal, but most web users ignorant,

daunted, or baffled

Wiki markup in some wikis:


Avoid wiki markup: make it feel like Word

Provide guidance on document structure to help

both readers and writers

Make participation obvious and not scary, without

buggering up prime function of documents – to be

read


Clear user requests: just tell me how to do X

Wanted to test hypothesis:

Structured documents helpful

Step-by-step instructions

Budget for lab-based user testing


Promoting the how-tos involved incessant use of

Twitter

Facebook

Conferences

Old-fashioned arm-twisting


‘Normal’ site content

Three new sections made wikiable

Provide ‘content types’ choice for new pages

Include discussion and history

Signal wikiness without overwhelming scan-and-

read functions


No budget for labs

Small test groups

Paper prototypes

Revise and retest rapidly

From paper to ‘test server’ ASAP


Wikiable sections termed iKnowHow & promoted

Much tweeting and blogging ‘iKnowHow’

Previews at conferences/meeting

Editorial in Guardian Society online

Adoption of ‘Blue Dots’ incentives for contributors

Quiet arm-twisting of likely contributors


First wikiable articles available 14 March 2012

First-month participation rate well above

Wikipedia’s, both

Edits of existing articles

Creation of new articles

No usability problems reported. None.

Likely to get quiet and build (if at all) slowly


Fail early, fail often strategy works

Two planned features not (yet) in the iKnowHow

service:

Rating and reputation for content and

contributors. Wicked problem

An interactive glossary not yet ready/easy to use

Otherwise ‘too early to say’.


This stuff is hard

Information/interaction design can make it fail

It can’t make it succeed.

You need a great client: in this case the KnowHow

NonProfit digital team at NCVO (National Council for

Voluntary Organisations)


just enough content management

Technology