What is a wiki?
A wiki is a type of website that allows anyone visiting the site to read, but more importantly add and edit content very quickly and easily, without any specialist knowledge of HTML, and sometimes without the need for registration. Most wikis allow you to attach files, or even e-mail content to pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for intranets, project collaboration or collaborative writing. The term wiki is a shortened form of wiki wiki which is from the native language of Hawaii (Hawaiian), where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something “quick” or “fast”.
Wikipedia is probably the best known implementation of the wiki concept. It’s the web’s largest multi-lingual, free-content Encyclopaedia - an excellent information resource which I usually use as my first port of call on a new topic, or an acronym I don’t understand. The project began in 2001, is available in over 100 languages, is operated by a non-profit foundation. Articles can be written or changed by anyone, including you and me. The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in 1994, and Wikipedia explains how he called it WikiWikiWeb after a bus line in Honolulu International Airport.
So Wikis are a great way for any community to share the job of building content on a particular topic of common interest, and are especially useful in business for project collaboration and knowledge sharing. They work well for customer support, where you can put product documentation in one place, provide pages of help, how tos, frequently asked questions, enhancement requests, and allow a real dialogue with your customer base
Why are wikis so good for collaboration?
Take a look at this video of Joe Kraus, the founder and CEO of JotSpot, at the white board explaining how wikis work. He shows that if you compare wikis with the old way of collaborating using e-mail, it provides a much better approach. Using the e-mail way for a group of people collaborating, somebody starts the conversation, and then the e-mail traffic goes back and forth between the team creating multiple threads, which each person stores in their own way on their own mail system or hard drive. Everything is locked in people’s inboxes, creating one of the key problems - lack of visibility. If somebody needs to find out the project status, one member of the team needs to find and forward the appropriate e-mails. If somebody new joins the team, they also need to have everything sent to them. This highlights another problem - have they been sent the correct, latest version? If there are associated documents or files, who has them, where are they, in which inbox, on which drive in our network?
With a wiki somebody starts the process by adding content to a wiki page through a browser. Once it is there, everyone can read and edit the content at the same time, and the wiki tracks all of the changes and the versions. You can always see the latest version, and if somebody has made a mistake, the wiki lets you revert back to an earlier version. You get easy visibility with all the individual change history of how you got to that point retained in one place. You can attach relevant documents and files, and everybody can be sure they are the latest, correct versions. Most wikis will also let you add and store e-mails to the page, so all relevant mail conversations are in the same place too. If somebody needs to know the status of the project, you just point them to the wiki page. If somebody new joins the team, you add them to the group and they have access to everything in one place.
Wiki software options
As with most software solutions, you can choose to obtain, install and manage wiki software on your own server and hardware infrastructure, or you can subscribe to a hosted service and let somebody else manage the IT headache. There dozens and dozens of products, including good commercial options, as well as open source projects.
Here is a list of wiki software covering almost every type of technology you can think of including Java, Microsft, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. Here is a table comparison of some of the more widely used wiki software platforms.
A number of wiki projects use MediaWiki, since the software is used by Wikipedia and there is a readily available pool of expertise. I have heard of several projects using Confluence, including one started inside PwC in the UK.
For hosted wikis, the two names you will come across most often are SocialText, founded by Ross Mayfield, and JotSpot, founded by Joe Kraus. I create and use wikis using both of these options - they both work well, and I would recommend them. I’m also testing out a new option from a Seattle based company called Wetpaint, which is currently in beta, and looks to have a very promising combination of features, but isn’t commercially available until a few months time.
SocialText has a reference base of Enterprise customers, a very scalable approach, and currently allows you to start a wiki for free for up to 5 users. JotSpot has very competitive pricing if you want to support a large number of users, and has a nice collection of free, off the shelf applications that you can add to the blog, such as forums, calendars, contact lists or bug trackers. I plan to do a more in depth comparison of these two platforms shortly.
Blogs, wikis and collaboration software
There is a growing trend to combine wiki technology with blogging capability to provide better collaboration and communication solutions. JotSpot, SocialText and Wetpaint all do this now, and you will begin to see more products combining these concepts. In addition, several of the current project collaboration products are beginning to add wiki and blog functions to their product roadmap. Since the same is happening with the content management systems used to build and manage websites, there will be a blurring of the differentiation and capabilities of these types of tools. The availability of low cost wiki and blog technology can only be a good thing for the end user, because they often provide much more cost effective project collaboration functionality than the currently available project software and tools.
Wiki Wednesdays
SocialText picked up and implemented the idea of Wiki Wednesdays. On the first Wednesday of each month there is usually a meeting held in a few locations in the USA and Canada, and one or two locations in Europe. People interested in the wiki technology and approach get together to share their experiences and ideas, or make contacts to get help from the experts. You can find out about the latest and recent events here.
Wiki Resources
WikiWikiWeb - the first wiki, which has been around since 1995
Wiki software list
Wiki software comparison
Twiki
Wikinews - the free content news source you can write
If you want help, advice or would like to make suggestions, please mail me.
