Something wiki this way comes

Do you enjoy collaborating via email, with all the versions, changes, comments, and collaborators to keep track of? You say you don’t, but don’t want to spend tons of money on a formal content or document management system that’s much too complex for what you need? Maybe the right solution starts with a lesson in Hawaiian!

What’s a wiki?

Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word “wiki”, meaning “quick”. The first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was created in 1995; today there are dozens of wiki applications available, including both free and low-cost commercial solutions and enterprise solutions.

At their core, wikis are websites that are easy to update for non-technical users. The wiki application provides users with a simple syntax or WYSIWYG editor and basic rules that streamline the creation of new pages as well as the editing of existing ones.

Wikis generally allow all users access to edit content, including deletion, and track changes as part of the core functionality. This makes it easy to keep content current – if a user sees something that is outdated or flat-out incorrect it’s trivial to fix it. Many wikis also support RSS feeds for changes so users can see recent updates and back them out if necessary.

Perhaps the most well-known wiki is Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), “the free encyclopedia anyone can edit”. Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has become home to more than 3 million articles in English and over 13 million articles total in 264 languages. By comparison, the 32-volume Encyclopedia Brittanica includes approximately 65,000 articles. The Wikimedia Foundation supports a number of other reference-oriented wiki projects, including Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and the WikiMedia Commons, a repository of images and other media files.

Use cases for wikis

Many organizations collaborate today using email to schedule meetings, exchange drafts, and gather feedback. These attempts often fall well short of the mark because users lose important messages in the flood of email they receive everyday. Someone also has to collate all the different versions and comments, determine which ones to keep, and send the revised document out to start the cycle again.

Instead, the author can post a draft document or article to a wiki. By making changes directly to the document in the wiki, other collaborators can eliminate a significant amount of email traffic and ensure that their changes are included. At the same time, editors or managers can review and accept changes or back them out and keep the previous version.

A wiki can also be an effective tool for managing projects. Project plans, schedules and deliverables can be posted to a wiki and updated by the team members doing the work. Nokia, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and Ziff Davis all use wikis to brainstorm, put together project schedules, and collaborate anywhere users have internet access.

Something wiki this way comes

One of the challenges organizations face in using wikis is that anyone can make changes to articles, including articles for which they have no expertise; where they are flat-out wrong; or where they have an agenda or particular point of view to push.

Moreover, as the wiki gets larger, it becomes difficult to review all the changes all the time. As a result of these issues, Wikipedia now tracks the username or IP address of anyone making changes to an article, and articles that are subject to vandalism get locked down.

There is also a tendency for articles that are heavily edited to start to drift from the original topic. This may not be as much of an issue for a wiki focused on a particular deliverable such as a records retention policy or project schedule.

Wikis benefit tremendously from having someone who takes ownership for the focus of the articles, their readability, etc. – but the benefits may not be readily apparent to those paying for the wiki.

Finally, wikis can stagnate just like any other knowledge-centric endeavor. The wiki should be reviewed periodically for outdated or incorrect articles and those articles either corrected or removed.

Working for the wiki

The easiest way to understand wikis is to start a wiki. There are a number of hosted services that can be used to start experimenting with wikis, and many of them are free for limited usage. Do a search for “free wiki” and take a look at the first few offerings.

Wikis are available in both hosted and installed versions. One of the benefits of a hosted solution is that there is no software to install or update and no hardware to commit. When the provider releases updates they are automatically provisioned. On the other hand, organizations may be reluctant to discuss sensitive or confidential topics on a hosted wiki even when security is implemented. In that case it may make more sense to install the wiki software inside the firewall. The same MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia is an open-source application that can be downloaded and installed; there are other providers, and some vendors even offer appliances that can simply be plugged into the network and set up rapidly.

Enterprises that want to implement a wiki should look for a solution that includes more robust security and audit trails, that ties into directory services, that has basic content management capabilities, is full-text searchable, supports multimedia files (images, audio, video), and that makes it as easy as possible for users to edit through templates and WYSIWYG editors. You’ll also want the capability to “publish” specific articles and pages or the entire wiki. The good news is that there are a number of these available and the list continues to grow – search for “enterprise wiki”.

Wikis show great potential to streamline collaborative efforts, particularly for document- and review-intensive processes. But they have to be used and tended periodically.

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