Until joining VMware, I haven’t been very wiki-fied.  It’s not for lack of exposure.  I know Ward Cunningham¹ through my involvement with OOPSLA (now SPLASH).  I’ve attended WikiSym, also through my involvement with OOPSLA.  I even helped the WikiSym folks get their 2011 site at my previous employer.  I’ve contributed a handful of things to Wikipedia, and a good friend now works for the Wikimedia Foundation.

But knowledge and exposure aren’t sufficient for actually using them.  I suppose I could use one for my own purposes.  I’m pretty sure that my husband still maintains a personal wiki for his own note-taking needs.  But deep in its soul, wikis are social.  They’re about collaboration.  To be truly wiki-fied, a wiki needs to be a part of the culture.  Wikis haven’t been part of the corporate cultures that I’ve been involved with, until now.

Internally, VMware uses wikis a lot.  We use them externally, too, such as the Zimbra wiki.  As a result, I’ve been very carefully wiki-fying my work life.  I started out by contributing to existing wikis, such as one that helps VMware Mac users get set up.  Now I’m creating wiki pages all over the place, using either my team’s wiki or my own user page as the launching point.

I upload pretty much every file that I create to the wiki.  They all get linked from my user page, which makes finding them easier.  I create pages for each of my research projects, which contain schedules and related documents.  My team uses our wiki for our weekly status reports, and so I dutifully create one every week.  I’ve even come to … well, not quite like, but at least appreciate the utility of having a weekly status report.

Now that I’m actively using wikis more frequently, it’s probably time to go back and read all of the research about them.  Maybe I’ll be moved to write my own paper for a future WikiSym …