Maintaining a vibrant wiki community is difficult and takes both work and comitment. Some say, "If you build it they will come," but in general it's just not that simple.

Grant Kruger

More wikis die than get adopted and used. You have to actively participate in your own wiki in order to ensure its survival. One thing you have to recognize is that a wiki is a community, whether you have chat, forums and/or blogs or not. Your community may be a workplace team or it may be a worldwide network, or anything in-between. Regardless, there are things you need to do to promote this sense of community and belonging, in order to maximize the effectiveness and usefulness of your wiki.

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content (excluding blocked users), using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranet and knowledge management systems. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work". More here.

A web community is a web site (or group of web sites) that is a virtual community. A web community may take the form of a social network service, an Internet forum, a group of blogs, or another kind of social software web application. More here.

The Basics of encouraging a vibrant wiki community:
    •    Keep people interested. Have a newsletter, featured contributors, featured articles, etc. Think of ways to keep users excited. Keep them coming back.
    •    Make it a part of their day. If a wiki becomes a part of someone's daily routine they will add more and better content.
    •    Serve the wiki community. Give them what they need/want. If the wiki does not serve them then they will not use it.
    •    Recognize different kinds of users. Some will only read the wiki, some will add only their own data, some will only edit existing articles, some will add only a couple of articles and others will contribute widely and regularly. Each group should be approached differently, and recognized, if possible.
    •    Sell the wiki as something that is needed by your users. Get their buy-in. Highlight the purpose of community right up front, as well as the mission and all of the needs and things served by the community. Keep the message front and center.
    •    Reward participation. Give attention. Recognize contributors and contributions. Allow some self-promotion, for example a home page for users/organizations that they can point to. Recognize the quality of content. Have featured articles on the front page -- you could recognize content and/or contributor. Boost contributor egos any way you can. Give thanks often. Make them feel that they belong and are welcome.
More advanced ways of encouraging a vibrant wiki community:
    •    Watch your web stats. Soup up the parts of the wiki that get the most traffic. Or add just enough to get the edits started. Web analytics for wikis is a complex subject though.
    •    Keep it in the wiki. Use your own wiki as much as possible. Blogs, etc are great, but beware of things that take people away from the wiki. If at all possible, and if it suits your needs, you can strengthen both community and collaboration by including blogs, forums and chat in the wiki.
    •    Use Twitter for promotion, news and all of the above. Possibly have two feeds, one for news and one for user community.
    •    Find your people. Search Twitter, homepages and blogs for people discussing issues that you would like to have appear in your wiki, and then reach out to them. Leave comments on their streams/posts that can be read by other visitors to their site.

Web analytics for wikis.
    •    Web analytics for wikis is a complex subject. You want to track views differently to edits and you want to track edits based on whether they were completed, are new content, as small edits, etc. You also want to track empty card clicks differently to other edit clicks. See if your wiki has tools for this. An example is one wiki that reported that only one edit was completed for every 17 edits that were started. The empty card/page clicks were a big part of this, and often users will edit one page in order to steal content formatting, so a contibutor could edit several pages, but only save one edit.
    •    For wikis that use AJAX, like this wiki, google analytics will now work with AJAX.
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The Universal Edit Button is a green pencil icon in the address bar of a web browser that indicates whether a web page (most often a wiki) is editable. It is similar to the orange "broadcast" RSS icon that indicates that there is an web feed available. Clicking the icon opens the edit window. It was invented by a collaborative team of wiki enthusiasts, including Ward Cunningham, Jack Herrick, and many others. The concept was first conceived during the 2007 RecentChangesCamp in Montréal. After coding by Travis Derouin, Brion Vibber and other programmers, the button was officially launched on June 19, 2008. See the official web page for more information, or see more from Wikipedia.
Grant Kruger