A good strategy for a person's first contact with a wiki is an Invitation to create a profile, like My Personal Info. For one thing, it's useful to have standard information about people, like phone numbers, email addresses, IM screen names, and web site URLs in an easy to access and easy to update place.

It's the difficulty of updating that hinders most other types of content management and web site creation tools, but this isn't the case with wiki so it's a much more attractive option. Personal pages also give people a place to write about themselves and the ease of doing this can make the first experience using a wiki enjoyable.

Building pages is also good for building community since people can help each other with questions or problems. Even just informally discussing things like what to include on the pages gets people talking about a common thread, and it doesn't have the same formality as working on a project.

⇒ Next: Build group collaboration