Web 2.0 – Understanding Wikis

Image via WikipediaBlogs work great in some circumstances.  For example, they work well with a singular person pushing out information and getting feedback. However, the person leaving feed back cannot change the original posting.  And there are times when parts of a page need to be edited, and/or new content pages added. Wiki’s are a good Web 2.0 method of solving this problem.

Wiki – Hawaiian for Quick, although I know not how that relates allows anyone (within reason) to modify, add, and update pages to the system.

Wikipedia is the best know wiki with millions of articles in dozens of languages. It allows anyone to make changes, or even add pages and categories.

Wikis are based off of the idea of the wisdom of the crowd. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, states that “the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

Instead of seeing an inaccuracy and reporting it, letting people continue to see it, possibly missing a comment, the person who sees the inaccuracy can go right in and change it.

Wikis are becoming increasing popular for project management and tracking.  In it everything from meeting notes, specifications, documentation, and even library files can be stored in the wiki.  IBM has become one of the best know companies to use wikis to track meetings minutes, events, projects and more.  However other companies from law offices, to consumer stores, have implemented wikis to promote communication and knowledge transfer among their workers.

To make them easier to use by non technical people, many wikis allow standard features like Rich Text Editing (Word like editing), and allowing people to search within the Wiki, without requiring anyone to know anything about HTML, or Wiki markup.