Keywords

In a Word Wikis are websites that invite voluntary contributions to organize information. They harness the power of collaborative minds to innovate faster, cocreate, and cut costs. They are now serious business.

Background

As the Internet revolution presses on, computer-mediated communications through social (conversational) technologiesFootnote 1 also seem to advance every day.Footnote 2 (Social sites such as MySpace and Facebook, commercial sites such as Amazon.com and eBay, and media sites such as Flickr and YouTube, to name a few applications, have become very popular.) Given the fast-rising number of these technologies, the confused might recall that people form online communities by combining one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many communication modes. The commonality is that all tap the power of new information and communications technology and the resultant interconnectivity to facilitate engagement, collaboration, and sharing of tacit knowledge. WikisFootnote 3 are one such form of social technology , designed to enable anyone with access to contribute or modify content using a simplified markup language. They are used to create and power collaborative websites. Some believe that such open, peering, sharing, and global tools ring the death knell of old-school, inwardly focused, self-contained corporations.Footnote 4

Definition

A wiki is a website—for corporate or personal use—that facilitates interactive,Footnote 5 self-referencing, and open-ended collection of definitions, descriptions, and references, viz., articles placed in topics and subtopics, using a simplified markup language. Wikis first appeared in response to the difficulty of using weblogs Footnote 6 (blogs) in a collaborative context. They have evolved into an increasingly popular tool for sharing all kinds of information in a browser-independent format, and a growing number of companies offer free and subscription-based applications as well as online storage for wikis.Footnote 7

Uses

The potential of wikis as open knowledge exchange systems is perhaps best illustrated by the rise of WikipediaFootnote 8 since 2001. Naturally, since contributions are voluntary, the uses of a wiki are limited only by the creativity of the people who access it. Potential uses include

  • primary, secondary, and tertiary education;

  • corporate knowledge repositories;

  • organizational directories;

  • network resource databases;

  • operations manuals;

  • standard operating procedures;

  • technical support manuals;

  • guides to reordering parts and services;

  • user’s guides;

  • cross-project overviews;

  • collaborative workspaces;

  • invoice tracking systems;

  • logs of client work;

  • lists of references;

  • lists of contacts;

  • to-do lists; and

  • frequently asked questions (FAQs).

Features

A Common Scenario In many organizations, exchanging electronic mail among multiple recipients has replaced the shuffling of paper documents. But electronic mail is quite inefficient if it is used to circulate documents for commenting or revision. An author may send a single document to, say, three peers, thereby creating three distinct copies of it. They may, in turn, respond by correcting their copy, blissfully unaware of one another’s comments or revisions. The author is then given three new copies of the same document, and burdened with the Sisyphean task of synchronizing the versions.

… No More Wikis address the circulation problems caused by electronic mail by keeping one document, but preserving various states of its evolution by recording the changes made by authorized editors. Hence, what starts as one document ends as one document. Also, by recording the history of changes, editors and authors remain focused on the same copy.

Wikis operate on a special type of content management system. Their main features are

  • Authentication and account management Wiki administrators process users, provide access privileges, and determine an individual’s role as reader (permitted to view documents and download content), editor (allowed to update existing content), or author (able to create new content, delete, and reorganize existing content).

  • Content management Wikis provide authorized users a simple web interface to add, edit, and save content in the system. Many popular content management systems employ WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interfaces that resemble those of a word processor. This permits authorized users to adjust elements such as font size, style (bold, underscore, italics), and other textual elements. Wikis also allow multimedia elements such as images and online videos.

  • Revision (change) history Each change to a wiki document is logged by the system. This function is important for two reasons: it establishes a record of revisions for accountability purposes and it permits administrators to roll back (“undo”) changes to an earlier version of the document. Wikis generally support the ability to let readers compare versions based on the revision history.

  • Cross platform compatibility Wikis rely on standard web-authoring languages to display output.Footnote 9 No special brand-specific software is required to read or edit a wiki, other than a standard web browser.

  • Others Wikipedia, the world’s most popular community-edited wiki, introduced a new feature called “Criticism”. While anyone can edit a particular entry on Wikipedia, authorized users may publish opinions about a particular update on a document.

Challenges

The principal impediments to wiki usage relate to integration and motivation:

  • Integration Most organizations operate with bundled, standardized office suites such as Microsoft Office or StarOffice. These suites typically offer powerful and integrated word processing, spreadsheet, database, drawing, and presentation capabilities, and allow users to copy and paste content across these. However, it is not easy for wikis to embed diagrams that users can continue to modify, such as flowcharts, while wiki tables are not as flexible or robust as Microsoft Office or StarOffice tables. Also, office applications allow faster copy and paste of images, a process that in a wiki usually requires two steps (uploading the file and linking to it).

  • Motivation The most active wikis will be those that motivate users to create and update content. Clearly, incentive programs and positive feedback in performance reviews have a role to play. Making wiki contribution part of standard deliverables will also improve its adoption rate.

Caveat

Trust and credibility are a challenge for public wikis because these are very much shaped by the abilities of their authors. Sites such as Wikipedia have been criticized on quality and accuracy (even if founder Jimmy Wales thinks that his product measures up to the Encyclopedia Britannica). Be this as it may, Wikipedia now delivers free knowledge products from purely voluntary contributions while the content of the Encyclopedia Britannica depends on paid subscriptions: the collaborative advantage of this most famous public wiki demands respect.