5 Effective Wiki Uses and How Companies Benefit From Them
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5 Effective Wiki Uses and How Companies Benefit From Them
Wikipedia came onto the scene in 2001 and quickly demonstrated how powerful and far-reaching collaborative content can be. Since then wikis have proven to be valuable tools for websites. Yet, few companies are using them to their full potential.
Here are five examples of how your business can benefit from using wikis:
Project Management
A wiki is ideal for project management because it provides a central hub to:
- Organize everything in one place so people can see an entire project.
- Streamline workflow and reduce reliance on email and documents that can easily get lost and confused with old versions.
- Inform everyone about the progress of the project, so people don’t have to worry about whether it is on schedule.
- Involve everyone. This speeds up the overall process bause it’s easier to incorporate feedback in-the-flow instead of after the fact.
Carbon Five, a company that develops enterprise Web applications, uses a wiki for project management. According to Founder and CEO Don Thompson, “Each client gets their own ‘space,’ an area where they can collaborate on projects with the team at Carbon Five.”
Custom/Client Collaboration
Red Ant, a Sydney, Australia based Web Design and development firm, uses a wiki as the main collaboration hub for employees and customers. I asked Been Still, managing director, how they use wikis: “First, a designer makes a page, attaches an image, and they’re done with their part. But then I might look at it and realize that it needs a bit more explanation, or a link to a wireframe diagram to give context. One of our developers might have also mocked up how a menu works, and so they stick in a link to that. Our client might email the link around, and then some comments on the page. This kind of collaborative workflow is one of our strengths, and it is really important for us to be able to add these various types of content easily.”
Documentation
A wiki is ideal for building content to be used in product documentation, reports, whitepapers, and even books. When publishing a book, an author can use wiki to develop their content. To keep the content private, you can give only editors and production staff ‘publisher access’ to the wiki space. Throughout the process, the editors can see progress on chapters, offer feedback, and easily export finished content via XML for print production.
Online Community
The most successful wiki-based online communities focus on specific topics, such as company’s products. This singular focus ensures that the wiki’s content will be scrutinized from every possible angle, yielding the best results. Remember that the whole purpose of wiki is to invite community participation.
On the SAP Developer Network Wiki the FAQ says. “…[the] main criteria for choosing to put content in the wiki is its volatility and dynamics, extendability and/or collaborative character. Ask yourself [if] you want others to be able to change, extend, regroup, add [to] your contribution.”
That’s an excellent question to ask, especially for content that’s going on a public wiki.
Policies, FAQ, Guidelines and Best Practices
A wiki can be especially useful for commonly needed information, like FAQ, guidelines, HR or purchasing policies. Editing permissions can be set so those responsible for these policies have the ability to edit them as needed and everyone else can read them. This eliminates the need to distribute paper copies of policies each time a change is made. Instead, the HR department can simply send an email announcing changes, with a link to the full policy page on the wiki.
These are just few ways a wiki can be used and you will soon discover that a wiki is one of the most versatile tools you can use. But what keeps people coming back is its simplicity. In a very short time, people can learn how to use the wiki and put any one of these examples into practice. Once they do so, they will wonder how they got along without it.
Interested In Starting a Wiki?
There are several options to choose from if you want to start you own wiki, some more sophisticated that others. If you want to get your feet wet, here are some popular choices.
MediaWiki
The single most popular open source wiki available and the same one that powers Wikipedia. The familiar interface will be comfortable for users.
http://www.mediawiki.org
TikiWiki
TikiWiki carries all of the functions of most wikis and includes support for blogs, forums and charts among some other features.
http://www.tikiwiki.org
DokuWiki
A popular choice among small and medium sized business for its ease of use and implementation. Carries fewer features and is not as customizable as the other two choices.
http://www.dokuwiki.org
About the Author: 
istioselida | Aug 21, 2008 | Reply
the truth is that i never thought that a wiki could be useful for this kind of collaboration in business… nice tips!