A new entry for Wikipatterns?

I just received an amazing email from colleague (Germany) explaning why the wiki spreading process was a bit longer than planned in his country: the email in which I sent the ID and password for our Confluence instance was considered by users as a spam. Why? Because my name is Martin Menu.

"The reason why some (few I know of, I admit) considered it spam was due to a combination of two reasons, I believe. Most people had never heard of you before, plus the alliteration in your name which in German - again no offend, Martin - sounds like an artificial name. You know if I was dealing drugs I would call myself Peter Pill or something. If I was dealing recipes I might consider calling myself Martin Menu..."

Can you believe that? So funny and unexpected. Hey, François, Stewart, your expertise is needed here! Do we need to create a new entry on Wikipatterns for this issue?

Loading mentions Retweet

Aug 28, 2008

François Nonnenmacher said...

And me who thought it would be better if emails sent from the wiki sport the name of a real person instead of an anonymous admin account! Now if people dismiss emails from colleagues because they don't know them or think their names sound funny, they might have social networking problems that no amount of software will solve ;-).

Email is broken, really. But when you have to rely on it to promote better tools, you do have a problem, indeed.

On a second thought, I wonder if this is cultural. Can you ask your colleague if s/he could suggest a better formulation or promotion way (or if this is really due to the medium being email)? Also, isn't this another reason to support the idea of having local gardeners who can deal with those cultural differences?

Stewart Mader said...

Wow! Martin this is definitely a first. I agree with François - this has little to do with the wiki itself, and much more to do with the larger problems surrounding email.

Martin, I'd love to have you write a guest post for Grow Your Wiki on this. People need to be more aware that this kind of thing can happen, and I'd like to see if the post prompts discussion of other, perhaps better, ways to notify people about the wiki so that we're not relying 100% on email.

If you're interested, send me an email and I'll get you set up with an account to post.

Best regards,
Stewart

MMartin Live Journal

Fans of this post

A new entry for Wikipatterns?

Comments (2)

Leave a comment...