Benefits of a Wiki

There is no doubt that the extremely popular Wikipedia website is an immense and ambitious project. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that employs a wiki (a software program that allows collaborative creation and editing of content) to generate its entries.

One of the benefits of a wiki is that it allows anyone with access to the internet to be involved in creating an online encyclopedia that catalogues every major human enterprise.

Wikipedia is a public wiki which means that it allows any member of the public to login and edit its content. This fact is one of the benefits of a wiki, yet it is also the root of most of the controversy surrounding the site. While there are various measures that can be put in place to protect a wiki from vandalism such as gradually allowing access to advanced editing features after users demonstrate responsibility, questions still remain about the accuracy of information entered and modified by obscure or anonymous users. Depending on the purpose of the wiki this may or may not be a problem.

A private wiki reduces the role that chance plays in the evolution of the information and the outcome can be focused by the contributions of a handful of individuals or opened up to a large community of experts. A wiki could involve as few as two, two thousand or ten thousand depending on the scope of the project, though small wikis tend to work better for most projects.

In its basic form, a wiki is a kind of collective memory, an online space where any number of users can post, edit and sort ideas and tangents for a project. Imagine how much more straightforward your projects could be if instead of jotting down ideas in notebooks, sending files via e-mail and constantly having to ask where your colleagues are up to you could keep it all organised online, and access all this information from anywhere with an internet connection. Such powerful organizational capabilities are yet another one of the major benefits of wiki.

Not every project is suited to reap the benefits of a wiki. Wikis are good for projects that require collaboration, where information needs to be archived, and where several individuals need access to the same information and need to be kept up to date on changes. You will also need to work out which wiki software is suited to the task. Wikipedia includes a comparison of wiki software:

Wikis are often employed by companies and universities to connect individuals in different departments and create knowledge bases. Organisations of all kinds use wikis for various projects, for instance:

Motorola use a TWiki in their Motorola Systems-on-Chip Design Technology. The wiki allows an onsite team in the UK to collaborate with a 'virtual team' with over 60 contributors who are located in Germany, Russia, Australia, and the US. So the benefits of a wiki for Motorola lie in its ability to compress space by having people from all parts of their global organization in essentially the same space.

British Telecom uses several wikis including TWiki as a business-to-business website to encourage feedback and discussion from customers.

Microsoft drew on the benefits of a wiki while developing the C Sharp programming language. The wiki was available on the internal network and displayed a list of issues that needed to be resolved and was updated as problems were solved.

Wikis do have their disadvantages and most of these are clearly visible on public wikis such as Wikipedia. Public wikis are highly susceptible to vandalism but are also designed with this in mind. Changes to any page are archived so that vandalism can easily be undone, and the page reverted to its previous state. Allowing public access does mean that someone will have to spend time monitoring changes that are made to the wiki. Depending on the project you will need to control who can access content on your wiki.

If you are attempting to create a dialogue with your customers to fully reap the benefits of a wiki, then you may need to allow public access. For projects that will gain no benefit from the general public you should limit access to only include those who have a direct relationship to the project. Wikis can be challenging for people who do not have a high level of computer literacy and tend to work best with a small group who are focused on a well-defined task, but the benefits of a wiki as well as their success and application is limited only by the user's imagination.

While wikis do have drawbacks and limitations they are a great way of keeping track of ideas and removing clumsy methods of communication and administration so you can concentrate on the most important thing: getting the job done properly!

Get it Together: Making wikis work

Public or private?