Wikis can help your smaller business do things like share best practices, show development, and mitigate information overload. At least that's what Jimmy Ray Purser wanted his to do. Find out what he learned about wikis and building an online community
In today's world of personalized information, you could say to someone, "If I wanted your opinion, I would look it up on a wiki somewhere." I was thinking the other day how resilient the Internet is. Just think, after the dot-com crash, many analysts wrote the Internet off like a pet rock or the Macarena.
Now, people know that I am not a big fan of analysts stating the obvious or using flashy titles to get us to buy some lame report. Consider the data pointing to the Internet being a passing fad:
- Dot-com crash
- Application service providers
- Napster no more
- DMCA file-sharing lawsuits
- I stopped receiving AOL CDs in my mailbox
It might not have died, but it certainly took a major hit. So the analysts had it partially right. The Internet is now (in this current era) all about personalization and sharing. Along comes a more personalized and service-driven Internet. ITunes replaced Napster, Google AdWords replaced dot-coms, and ASP was replaced with hosted solutions like Salesforce.com.
Exchanging Ideas With the World
After being inspired by In-N-Out Burger's Double-Double with fries, Ward Cunningham thought, "Wouldn't it be cool to exchange ideas with the rest of the world?" and wikis were born. Originally written in Perl, wiki is Hawaiian for quick, and in the end that is what a wiki really is: the ability to get information on the Web quickly. (Do you know that Hawaiian is the only word in the Hawaiian language that does not end in a vowel? I'll take obscure Polynesian trivia for 40, Art ... showing my age ... I mean, Alex ...)
This is the power of the Internet. One person can really make a difference in cyberspace. Ward Cunningham was chillin' with a stack of C# code, and he just wanted to share ideas between fellow code jockeys, so he knocked the dust off a HyperCard stack he wrote in the '80s, used a little bit of Perl, and Web 2.0 was born. Now look at how many times you use some form of a wiki every week.
The Trouble With Wikis -- Or Not
Some folks do not like wikis because of lack of authority (no way to tell if what you are reading is true or not). Personally, I believe that problem fixes itself. If the info turns out to be incorrect, then people stop going to the site, and a few months later an "under construction" single default index page is all that is left. Another reason is unrestricted editing. Anyone can edit any topic. Many people have gotten into trouble for editing stuff they should not. Remember Adam Curry editing Wikipedia to take credit for podcasting technologies to build himself up or Microsoft editing Apple's entry to look like Apple had more bugs in its code?
So you want to build a wiki for your business or department? As a case study, Cisco's TechWiseTV jumped into the collaboration "Me-Net" era of the Internet, and we built our own wiki. Here are some of the lessons we learned about wikis and building an online community.
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