Evolved Technologist -

One of the favorite ideas that occurred to me when I wrote Wikis for Dummies was the notion of a Tom Sawyer wiki, one of the sure-fire paths to failure if you are attempting to launch a wiki.

In the eponymous book, Tom Sawyer, a character invented by Mark Twain, is a clever boy who has to paint a fence as a punishment. Instead of doing the work himself, he pretends to be having a great time doing the work and presents the task to his friends as an honor. Tom Sawyer succeeds in conning his friends out of some of their possessions for the privilege of painting the fence for Tom.

Tom Sawyer wikis are exactly the same thing. Someone creates a wiki, a remarkably easy thing to do nowadays, and then announces to the world that the wiki is open and ready for painting, that is, content creation. The problem is that the wiki has no content. Perhaps the wiki reflects some taxonomy, but there is no there there. The creators of Tom Sawyer wikis expect that other people will now see the task of filling the wiki with content as a great honor.

In Wikis for Dummies, I pointed out how the www.CosmeticsWiki.com was a perfect example of a Tom Sawyer wiki. It seemed like such a good idea; women who use cosmetics would enter their comments and opinions about which cosmetics they liked and disliked. All you had to do to participate was spend time writing up your thoughts on the wiki and then others would benefit from your ideas. The owners of www.CosmeticsWiki.com would of course benefit from the traffic by selling advertising. The authors of the content would benefit by getting the warm glow of knowing that they were sharing and helping the community. Alas, this time Tom Sawyer was not able to make the sale and www.CosmeticsWiki.com is no more.

We all have to watch out when we are creating wikis to make sure that we are not playing the role of Tom Sawyer. For large public wikis, the difference between a Tom Sawyer wiki and a thriving wiki like Wikipedia or http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen is the passion of the community. If people really feel warm and fuzzy about creating content and sharing their ideas, then the critical mass of energy to create content may emerge and the sky's the limit. But if the audience who would use the content if it were there doesn't feel the passion to create it, you have a Tom Sawyer wiki.

Inside companies and organizations, Tom Sawyer wikis emerge when someone thinks it would be a good idea if a lot of other people did some work to create useful content. To me, the test to determine if an idea is a Tom Sawyer wiki or not is my own personal motivation for using it. If I can imagine spending an hour or two a week creating content on a wiki, then perhaps others will as well. If I just want the content and do not feel the passion, perhaps the wiki shouldn't be started.

Tom Sawyer wikis don't do much harm, except if they turn people off wikis entirely. So, when introducing wikis inside a company, be on the lookout for Tom Sawyer wikis when spreading the word.

I also think that the Tom Sawyer wiki phenomenon proves the point I will be arguing in the upcoming web cast debate" with Mark Finnern. My position, which Mark cleverly summarized (in a negative way) as "Intelligent Design" is as follows: to really get the benefit of a community to create content, you have to go first and create at least a draft version of the content that contains enough structure and ideas so people can disagree with them. Then they will know what you are saying and can weigh in. To start with a blank page, which Mark calls "Evolution" is just another version of a Tom Sawyer wiki and will only take off in rare circumstances.