Most people have either heard about or used wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It has over 490,000 articles (and that’s just in english) and with over 16,000 contributors, it’s the biggest encyclopedia in the world. What you will notice, is it’s a wiki. Wikis are free, open source platforms. And they are growing like crazy.
Did you know you can use them in your business to help your teams be more productive? In today’s video Leele Fever from the commoncraft show explains how to use wikis. They are great for group organisation and co-ordination. The best bit? Everyone can change what is on the website. And they are so easy to use; you have edit, save and link. That’s all! And that’s all you need. The link button is used to create a new page. The edit button allows you to edit a page and the save button saves your changes. It really couldn’t be any easier.
You can use wikis for project management and collaboration, knowledge management or document management. And it’s free and simple to set up a wiki on the internet or company intranet. They are so simple to use, there is just one version and they are accessible to everyone. This is why they are so popular.
You might think as it’s open to anyone to change, it could be abused, but you’d be surprised how that doesn’t happen. Wikipedia is open to anyone but amazingly accurate. If a change is made that’s wrong, a wiser person will correct it. Anything offensive is removed just as quickly. It’s the perfect example of crowdsourcing, which harnesses the wisdom of the crowd.
So, how can you get started? There are plenty of places to try out wikis. Pbworks is a wiki for business, education and even voice collaboration. Wetpaint is a wiki that gives anyone free reign to create a simple website of their choice. And wikispaces have over 4 million members who have created over 1.5 million wikis.
Information week says it’s the perfect knowledge management tool and there are lots of organisations and corporations around the world using wikis for all sorts of purposes. For example, yahoo uses a wiki for document and product project planning, for the 100′s of people in their development team scattered all over the globe, who all need to collaborate with each other.
Wikis could change the way you organise data forever.
