In the last year or two, there have been some amazingly useful wiki brands like PBWiki, Socialtext and WetPaint - these companies all let you start a wiki in minutes.That said, sometimes it can be pretty difficult to gauge how useful the information on any given wiki page can be.
As you scan through Wikipedia, you don't see any marker of "usefulness" or "helpfulness" on a given page. The same could be said for the search results of Google, Yahoo, Cuil, Mahalo, Powerset or any other search engine. Forums, generally, have carried some levels of helpfulness ranking (stars, etc.) for years.
We can't even say that this "helpfulness" index is something that's only missing from the small wiki software brands and the search engines; big enterprise brands don't carry this feature either.
Lots of big enterprise brands like have community networks, and in them are wikis (like this one, SAP's Enterprise Performance Management Wiki). You'd think that these brands would want to guage how helpful pages are within a given wiki, especially when they're selling software that costs millions of dollars.
Microsoft typically monitors their support pages on some type of "helpfulness" metric, even if it's something as simple as "yes this helped/no it didn't," with an RFI (request for information) to clarify why the support information sucked or didn't suck.
Here's how I'd solve the "helpfulness" problem on a wiki
- Figure out if your wiki vendor permits you to embed scripts (e.g. Javascript) or Flash or whether you need to use pure HTML
- Decide exactly which metric you're trying to allow users to rate. Some would include:
- Page "helpfulness": how helpful the user found it
- Page "truthiness": how believable the user found a given entry
- Decide how you'd like to illustrate your rating metric
- Split view compares the user's rating versus the aggregate rating
- Combination view combines the user and aggregate rating into one graphic
- Score view allows for a Digg-type thumb-up/thumbs-down view
- Pick a third-party rating tool to use. Here's a list of a few that look usable.
- JS-Kit (their graphic is shown above) - here's another example of how it looks in use (script)
- Widgetbox's Ratings Widget (script, I think...)
- LivePipe's minimalist CSS rating tool (pure HTML)
- GetUserFeedback (pure HTML)
- Email your wiki brand to ask them which of the four tools they like best, and move ahead with the one that they say will be the least problematic
We could talk about doing centralized reporting for this sort of helpfulness metric, but we'll have to tackle that in a future post.
If you're wondering about the impetus for this post, someone at an enterprise software brand was having trouble answering a wiki question, so I decided to jump in and answer it here on MetzMash. If you're ever having questions like this, and want them answered confidentially, just email them to adam metz [aht] g mail dot com.
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