Wiki adoption in enterprise - Participation inequality

There have been few online discussions about how emails and word documents are bad and their use in collaborative environments and organisations should be reduced. I mostly agree. Email within enterprise has become most used tool and often work comes to standstill if email is down. So regimented have we become with use of emails that we don’t want to use tools which are far better suited for today's changing times of increased collaboration where participants are often sitting across continents. Email is a great tool but like any other tool it is meant to do a certain task and not everything. While championing the use of wiki for team collaboration, I had few observations:

1. No learning new tool: Many people don’t use wikis because they don’t want to learn a new tool. Even though using wiki is as simple as typing in plain English with some simple mark up, it appears too much to learn for many.
2. Old Habits Difficult to Change: Many just don’t get it why they should not use MS Excel and MS word for certain tasks and instead should be asked to use the wiki. They think the wiki is an overhead and they dont have time to go to a site and put content there. They dont consider wiki as a tool but as some fancy site. Old habits die hard.
3. Email Regimentation: Heavy use of email has regimented us. I have seen many people doing their wiki contributions starting with "hellos" and ending with "regards" like they do in emails.
4. Scarcity is power: Many feel threatened by wiki culture as it takes away the control. Information and knowledge is the power. Scarcity of information is what makes certain people derive their power and authority. They wouldn't want to let it go. They want to keep the information scarce.
5. Openness is scary: Wikis are open and content can be created/edited and deleted by user. That scares lots of people. Many years of corporate life where every tool is controlled and every usage need some sort of approval by someone, this openness and control sounds too good and too scary.
6. No incentive to contribute: Wiki pages are result of collaboration and author names are not displayed on top of page. This puts off people as they are used to announce their names on top of word documents. Word documents can be sent over emails with CC to all those people who would do your year end performance reviews. Personal efforts are recognised and not the collaborative so there is little incentive in contributing to wiki.
7. Volunteering is unfamiliar: Wikis are flat, unstructured and non-hierarchical. That is exactly opposite of what an enterprise is. People who are too accustomed to hierarchies and being directed, volunteering to wiki remains an unfamiliar territory.

All This though is hardly surprising as most of multi-users communities suffer from this pattern of behaviour where very few people contribute and most just lurk around. This is also called as participation inequality and is excellently explained by Jacob Nielsen. As per this theory :

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action

The benefits which a simple, social and collaboration tool like wiki can bring behind firewall are immense but there remain few roadblocks to overcome to make wikis a success. I stumbled upon a site called wikipatterns , which does a very nice job of documenting patterns on wiki adoption. It s many patterns some of which I have personally come across, like wiki phobia (somewhat similar to my point 4 above). Reading the patterns, I just realised that I was about to become a Wiki Bully.