Collaboration site incentives for contribution

At work we use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) for team and project collaboration. After several months, it now contains a wealth of useful information in our knowledge base wiki, various discussion groups, and blogs. We have the ongoing challenge, though, of getting people to participate. One of the hardest problems to solve is how to get people to take time after solving a problem or coming across a tip to write it in the knowledge base or as a tip of the day.

I think one intriguing solution worth trying is to provide incentives in the form of quality voting. Many web sites that accept user contributions use such a system: users can vote either thumbs up or thumbs down or, in some cases, on a numeric scale, how useful they think the review or article is. The poster of the article then accumulates points based on the number of positive votes their contributions receive.

We could do the same sort of thing by attaching voting mechanisms to discussion boards, wikis, blogs, etc. This encourages not only quantity but quality.

Then, points could be exchanged for rewards. Achieving a certain point level could also be part of employee goals. We could also reward fractional points for simply voting, to encourage reading and voting.

Unfortuntely, SharePoint 2007 doesn't include this capability. It would be a useful excercise for someone to write an extension to SharePoint to provide it. See this article for some ideas.