Capping IT Off
Wiki is emerging as one of the most promising Enterprise 2.0 technologies for knowledge management. If the content is going to change continuously, and produced collaboratively, use of Wiki is highly recommended. If you want a group of members to work together specially to create content, Wiki would be a great way to coordinate and collaborate.It is a website that lets its users create, edit, and link a collection of articles. It allows the content and the structure to be changed by a community of users even that community spread across geographically whatever thousands of users they could be.
Here is a video which explains the basics of a wiki .We made use of similar kind of videos at Knowledge Management awareness campaigns in different locations on Wiki. Popular example of a Wiki is Wikipedia a user created & editable knowledgebase which has grown into world’s largest encyclopaedia online.
Wiki can be limited to a firm by installing a wiki platform inside the company firewall. Click here for a Wiki guideline document authored by me. Specific emphasis is on what and where, rather than how is made. Markup Syntax for both Media Wiki [Engine for Wiki at our KM2.0] and JSP Wiki [Engine for TeamForge wiki] is also covered
There are many Wiki engines available both in proprietary and open source versions. I like MediaWiki, DokuWiki,TiddlyWiki and PhpWiki.You can get the feedback and compare the features of variety of Wiki engines at following sites: Comparison of wiki software or Wikimatrix
Most of the Wikis offer “What You See Is What You Get” kind of editors for which you don’t need to have markup language knowledge like html and special markup languages. A new version of Wiki page gets created for each time it is edited and saved.
You may be thinking, how it is different from blog and discussion forum. In blogs, only the author can edit their article/thought (others can just comment).In wikis, anyone can edit the original article unlike blogs and discussion forum. Wikis don’t contain chronological posts unlike blogs rather it can track version histories. Blog posts are permanent in nature where as wiki’s content is a perpetual work in progress. In my opinion, it can change the way we browse and read online content. Simple chunks of content make every one most interesting to read.
One of the features I like most in Wikis is its ability to organize itself organically. It can create a content structure based on our inputs i.e. users can create a flexible ontology on their own and options to enable or disable site structure. Knowledge can not only be stored and retrieved, but also developed and enhanced at Wiki is the beauty of Wiki!! .Ease of use and contribution will exponentially lead to higher participation.
“Categories” concept at Wikis almost replaces “tagging”. It helps in reducing redundant content and also helps in search on similar subject artefacts
Community based development of content and sharing of documents can make the document management and Web content management into a unified knowledge management tool which supports a practice rather than process. Intuitive navigation and simplicity in content creation makes Wiki to prefer as an easiest Knowledge Management tool
Wikis are anarchistic in nature in the sense it has no power structure. Because of this nature no user owns the Wiki and its content. All users can have similar permissions but it differs from Wiki to Wiki. Most of the Wikis contain sypos [system operators] that possesses additional functionality for vandalism reversions.
I felt Wikis are most useful for both Information management and knowledge management on creating following things:
- Online user guidelines [Documentation for a product]
- Yellow Pages for corporate
- Glossaries
- Mind Mapping
- Project Management
- Client’s thoughts/opinions/reviews
- Group email
- Collaborative software development
- Ideas Management
- Knowledge bases
- Corporate Intranet
Praveen Veeramalla is a Knowledge Management Consultant within Capgemini.You can follow and connect with him via Twitter.Currently, he is also doing a part time doctoral research on Knowledge Management
Connect!! Collaborate!! Enhance!!
About the author
I’m a great fan of using wiki’s. In fact, the website for Capgemini’s agile Accelerated Delivery Platform (www.accelerateddeliveryplatform.com) is a wiki. We have been using this form of online collaboration for years, sharing our knowledge and experience in public.
However, as with many communities, wiki’s also suffer from the fact that only a few members of the community actually contribute to the content of the wiki. This is a difficult issue that is even challenging to the more popular wiki’s in the world. Think Wikipedia, where an emergency call is shouted out to reach new content authors. A similar challenge face community blog and even community Twitter sites (such as Yammer). In the end they become websites for the happy few.
Great post Praveen. Having just started using ClearWiki within our marketing team, I have to say it’s made a huge amount of difference. For me, the real-time aspect of working in a wiki is just great. Rena
We are using http://www.comindwork.com for managing our small business, I especially like the enterprise wiki, that allows us to effectively structure our knowledge base.