* Wikis have finally become main stream enough for Corporate America
It may have taken more than ten years, but wikis are finally main stream enough for Corporate America. It’s even gotten to the point where you can suggest to your work colleagues “I think we should wiki” without getting charged with sexual harassment.
A wiki, as defined by Wikipedia – the granddaddy of all wikis – is “a type of Web site that allows anyone visiting the site to add, to remove, or otherwise to edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing.”
If you’re not familiar with wikis and need an analogy, think “town hall meeting,” where everyone has a voice and the opportunity to share written information. Wiki software from companies like SocialText and JotSpot allow for quick and easy contributions, or posts, from everyone in the invited community.
The operative notion here is that everyone in a specified community can contribute to a wiki in near-real time. This is unlike a static Web site, which is controlled by a Webmaster who decides what can be posted, and when. Even a company intranet usually has a content cop who decides what information is appropriate for others to see.
That’s not to say that wikis are like the Wild West – completely lawless and “anything goes.” The members of the wiki community are not just the contributors of the information, but the authenticators as well. Everyone is responsible for vetting the contributions to make sure they are accurate and appropriate. If content is found to be false, offensive or otherwise inappropriate, it can easily be rolled back or removed. Since posts are attributed to specific contributors, it’s easy to see who has added what to the wiki.
So how might you use a wiki in your workgroup? Let’s say your department is preparing for the rollout of Microsoft Vista in 2007. You’re already testing the software in a lab today. The wiki could be your virtual place to store information such as test scripts, test results, project plans, conversations about which users will be the first in line for the rollout, etc. Your team can develop a project plan collaboratively, as fast as you can type your posts and submit them. The history of all communications is preserved for all to see.
Corporate wikis are being touted as a prime way to reduce e-mail traffic. When you can communicate with your entire work team quickly and share all relevant information in one place, there’s little need to route messages and attachments via e-mail. Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, says that wikis can reduce e-mail traffic by as much as a third.
Mayfield also says that wikis can be used to create a “living intranet.” Instead of the stale static information that is often out of date on intranets, you can create a document center where information can be updated and shared by many. You don’t need to wait days or weeks for content to be approved and coded into HTML; postings are almost instantaneous to your wiki. “It’s the end of the World Wide Wait,” Mayfield says.
In case you are wondering, the term wiki is a shortened form of the native Hawaii phrase wiki wiki, which is often used as an adjective to denote something “quick” or “fast.” This explains the social philosophy of a wiki: everything can be contributed and built quickly. No waiting for content approval. No waiting for coding or formatting. No waiting for someone else to post the knowledge that you have to share.
The greatest example of a wiki is Wikipedia, the Web site where anyone in the world can post information about things that would commonly be found in an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is also a model for how community policing of content works. Last year, someone knowingly contributed information that was completely false. Rather quickly, this contribution was smoked out by others and removed from the site.
If you think you might like to experiment with a wiki, SocialText will give you a thirty day free trial. If you decide that you want to implement wiki software, your choices are broad: you can purchase a package, lease the software as a hosted service, or download open source software and customize it to fit your needs.
