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How Can You Measure a Wiki's Worth?
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."
Depending how much of a BOFH you want to be you could ask users to rate the wiki, either a rating for any page they use (hard to enforce): MS have something like this as too do IBM, IIRC, "rate this article on ...".
Alternatively you could do an exit survey, when a user leaves teh site you pop-up a survey to ask about their experience.
Perhaps you could simplify adding templates and get users to add class markings (I think that's what they call them) for things like "this is a lame article", "this article needs editing for brevity", etc. and markings of "this is a B grade article", etc., then run a test of how many of what grades are given and how many templates are used.
Note that templates describing failings will be more prevalent as the wiki gets more use (per user and overall user count) a PHB might not twig this and will think quality is going down.
You could also measure uptake versus the previous sources.
That's actually a pretty useful suggestion. Think about it, the real question the PHB is asking is, why should we continue to fund this thing? Are we getting our money's worth? The best way to answer that is to see how much, if at all, people are using it, and what they think of it. Your survey may just be the metric the bosses are looking for.
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I was going to mod you insightful, but there's an easier and more positive way to apply those buzzwords...
A good PHB is mostly concerned about 3 things:
1. A decent ROI. ( From the business as a whole down to the paper-clip supplier and the birthday party commitee.)
2. Making the people above him/her look good.
3. Control. (So #1 and #2 above can be maintained over time and change. You have to stay organized when you delegate or it's impossible to manage anything)
If you concern yourself with the exact same things in the exact same order then it should be easy for you to figure out what to do and what buzzwords to say.
The doing might be hard, but the "what to do?" should become easily apparent.
In other words answer these questions as asked by your boss:
What's the ROI on your wiki project?
What's the weakest link to me (PHB) not worrying about this..meaning what person or machine or database do we need to protect and make redundant?
Who can I trust (to make me look good) when they say it's a success. I will keep asking dumb questions until I find a leader I can trust.
Who should I scold if the ROI on this project starts tanking?
In 2 or 3 short sentences, what does it do so I don't look stupid when people ask me. And when I ask "what does it do?" I do NOT mean how does it work. I mean what Return does it provide on what Investment?
Careful though, thinking like this will get you promoted FAST.
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