Wikis are Big News

Abstract

Groups with common goals or interests are increasingly making use of collaboration software to manage information and communicate more effectively with each other. Examples of these groups include project teams within organisations as well as more informal groups, such as the editors of internet information resources. There are a great number of tools available to facilitate collaboration; in this article we discuss the wiki.

About Wikis

Wikis have recently gained great popularity as a means of sharing information, with sites such as WikiPedia, the free encyclopaedia, becoming major hubs of publicly available information. The name, wiki, is based on the Hawaiian term "wiki wiki", meaning "quick" or "informal". The first wiki created was The Portland Pattern Repository, dedicated to information about pattern languages in computer programming.

How Wikis Work

The wiki model enables users to collectively create and edit richly interrelated content without the need to understand HTML or spend undue time on document formatting. This allows users to focus on creating and managing content. Traditional wikis allow all users to edit content without review, although some wiki tools offer authentication or have a content moderation process. The majority of wikis retain all previous versions of each topic, acting as an audit trail as well as an historical reference. Most wikis offer a search facility, similar to an internet search engine to allow users to quickly locate information within the wiki.

Why Business is Embracing the Wiki

Due to their simple and quick operation wikis have gained huge popularity within technical organisations as a means of facilitating collaboration. Non-technical organisations are beginning to discover the business benefits to be gained by enabling low overhead sharing of frequently updated, loosely structured information. The update-on-demand nature of wikis is ideal for managing and sharing collections of frequently changing information facilitating collaboration.

Examples of applications for wikis include:

Knowledge bases
- Leveraging otherwise dispersed knowledge within a group of individuals
- Facilitating rapid location of information
Project planning
- Giving project teams visibility over a project plan and enabling members of the team to update statuses in real time.
Marketing plans
- A means of collecting large a volume of loosely structured information and deriving structure from it.
Suggestions
- An open forum for recording and commenting on suggestions.
Recording of meeting minutes
- Quick and accessible means of recording and distributing meeting minutes.
Online brainstorming
- An open, online area for collecting and refining ideas.
Freeform information recording
- Enables free form information to be attached to records within a structured database system and updated as required.

According to the twiki web site these major corporations are already seeing business benefit through using wikis:

BT
Cingular Wireless
Disney
Motorola
SAP
Wind River
Yahoo!

Wiki Products