Promoting Wiki Buy-In With My Teammates

Yesterday I met with my department group to discuss the Faculty Support wiki and to invite their participation with this project. As I reviewed with them how I built up the structure of the wiki it became clear to me that they perceived this project as a one-time authoring of content and that once it was completed, it would require no additional attention, or to put in one of my team member's words, "like Wikipedia."

I attempted to clarify and state that the purpose of the wiki was to be an informational commons where we can enter pertinent reference content with faculty members as the intended audience, and update it and/or make corrections as needed. I also mentioned that we can invite faculty to contribute to the wiki as well. At that point, one of the team members stated that he wanted to revisit the structure of the Faculty Support wiki so that it looks more like Wikipedia. Wikipedia may apparently be a standard for some, and this includes areas such as font sizes and other characteristics I have yet to learn about.

We ended our meeting on a positive note. We discussed that as this is likely the first departmental group wiki in our institution and that we have an opportunity to set a standard for other groups who may soon wish to follow.

My tack now is to review the wiki one-on-one with each of my group members (there are five of us) and to answer any questions each individual may have about wikis and their participation.