The most common role that most of us play when interacting with wikis is that of a reader or researcher. We want to find out something, so we use our favorite search engine and are directed to a wiki. Much of the time, people who find information this way don’t know that they’re using a wiki. They just see a nicely formatted page with the information they seek. This is as it should be. The content of a wiki is always more important than the form.

After you see a page, though, knowing that it is part of a wiki and was created by people in a self-organizing community, you might be ready to put yourself and your knowledge out there and become a contributor.

Contributors to wikis are those of us who have something to say or have knowledge that we’re burning to share. Contributors read wiki pages and click that Edit button to make them better. Contributors start new pages and do their best to fill them out. Contributors make comments on pages in wikis that have discussions attached to pages. What contributors inevitably find is that other people created those pages or are reading them. It doesn’t take long after you are a wiki contributor to start meeting and interacting with other people who are drawn to the same pages that you are.

The excitement of learning, sharing, and creating knowledge as well as collaborating to get work done often leads readers and contributors to want to spread the word — to become wiki evangelists. For public wikis, this can mean something as simple as linking from other Web sites or blogs to pages on the wikis. For wikis inside the boundaries of companies or other organizations, it can mean helping to make others aware of what is on the wiki and how that content can be used to help them do their work. Most people who use a wiki regularly become evangelists because they start bringing others into the wiki or driving people to the content they have helped create.

A wiki is only as good as the information on it. With an active wiki, tens, hundreds, or thousands of people might contribute content. Some contributions will be better than others. Some will be brilliant, and others will be sloppy or just plain wrong. In most successful wikis, a quality control patrol springs up. This patrol is staffed by people who care about the quality of the information on the wiki and who know how to use the Recent Changes button to good effect. The quality control patrollers look at changes made to the wiki and examine them to make sure that they are accurate and meet the standards of the other content on the wiki.

When wikis get active, all sorts of maintenance tasks spring up. New users must be given accounts. Special tasks such as archiving old content or performing bulk changes must be performed. New wikis must be set up and old wikis must be taken down. Permissions to who can see which wiki must be changed. New extensions to wiki functionality must be installed and brought into production. Administrators are the equivalent of the auto mechanics of wikis who make all this happen.

Wiki engines run on servers. A slow wiki or one that is unreliable isn’t likely to be successful. It’s not uncommon for a wiki to fall into disuse after just one major outage shakes the confidence of the community of users. When a wiki becomes popular, the server should be enhanced to keep pace. Operations and hosting engineers — who keep the servers on wiki engines humming along — are key players in a wiki community.

Wiki engine developers are the programmers who create the wiki engine in the first place and who continue to develop it by adding functionality. Developers can also help by tailoring the wiki to meet the needs of the community. When wikis are used to support communication, project management, and work flows in organizations large and small, the bells and whistles that many wikis offer become invaluable. In addition to the basic functions of a wiki, features such as calendars, alerting mechanisms, task tracking, meeting minutes, easy commenting, and simple work flow systems can amplify productivity immensely.

Wiki communities not only have computer plumbing, but they have social plumbing, too. In most active wikis, natural disagreements (that people in most communities have) soon express themselves in the context of the wiki. If disputes are not handled in a fair manner that satisfies everyone involved, people might be driven away from the wiki, possibly decreasing its value. Policy and process contributors, the people who worry about setting up policies and processes (often by example but sometimes formally), play a crucial role in keeping a wiki running. The larger the wiki is and the more people involved, the more important this role becomes.

Not everyone likes working with wikis. Not everyone likes the communities that form around them. Critics look at wikis from the outside and point out where they fail and how they fall short of their stated mission. This can be a valuable service to those who want to make wikis work as well as they possibly can.

The wiki champion or founder is the person who fought the battles needed to get the wiki up and running, recruited the initial participants, seeded the content, found servers to use, set up the software, and did whatever it took to get the wiki going. In almost every wiki community, the champion or founder plays a special role and provides the crucial energy to keep the community moving forward and the cool head to resolve disputes.