The Do's and Don'ts of Wikis

Wikis can revolutionise the way your staff collaborate and share information, but should be used properly to get the best business benefits.

I must confess, I have a real love, hate affair with wikis.  They are a great tool, but when used poorly, they can do damage.

Wiki - another of those "Web 2.0" buzzwords which is relatively new in the mainstream,  but the concept itself is not new. 

Simply put, wikis a form of content management in that they basically enables anyone multiple editors to add, remove and edit the content of a webpage from their computer.   

While this definition fits a range of software solutions, from simple blogs to enterprise content management systems the use of the term these days implies simplicity and the ability to make quick and easy edits. They range from allowing a free for all editing environment, allowing you and anyone else to edit text and hyperlinks to virtually any type of content. 

Wikis are extremely useful in business, particularly with intranets and extranets for online collaboration projects, but they tend to have an unstructured nature and despite the ease of editing, they can bloat and get out of date. 

In order to see the true potential (and potential pitfalls) of wiki technology let's take a quick look at the most powerful of them all - Wikipedia.

Wikipedia once marketed itself as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit.  The concept that all information should be free is both simple and mindblowing.  No application has come close to what it offers and the sheer size that Wikipedia makes it an amazing phenomena.  At one stage it had the potential to become the greatest and most comprehensive encyclopedia ever created.  

To support multiple editors, Wikipedia uses a very basic form version control, which provides users with a change log from which contributors can compare the difference between each edited version, enabling you to visually track the "evolution" of a document.  Contributors can collaborate on projects, discuss new ideas and resolve disputes.  These tools helped wikipedia to snowball with an awe inspiring level of detail on almost every topic imagineable, and has even branched out into distinct sub-sites such as Wikispecies, Wikitravel and Wikiquote and has been translated into almost every language known to man.

But more and more evidence suggests that the "wiki of all wikis" is collapsing under its own weight.  The online encyclopedia has drawn criticism that its model is fundamentally flawed and recent developments may be contributing to its demise.

Due to its open nature, wikipedia is often the subject of vandalims and much of its content is unreferenced and can be grossly innacurate.  It is also subject to abuse from personal agendas, political bias and non-neutral points of view.   One particular case in point is the phenomenon of "nerd bias", an overwhelming number of Internet who contribute to Wikipedia are people fascinated by the details of the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, such that it includes plenty of stuff that you never saw on the big screen and George Lucas himself never thought of.  As a result, you'll find plenty of "fan cruft", where you can learn everything from Luke Skywalker's favourite food to a complete digest of every single moment inside the Big Brother house.

Underpinning the ease of use is the insatiable appetite of the content consumer marketplace.  The encyclopedia offers a simple search, quickly augmented by results from external engines such as Google.  This offers a a form of ambrosia to anyone looking for information, with the world literally at their fingertips.  People are so passionate about Wikipedia that they have collectively donated many millions of dollars to the Wikimedia foundation to watch it grow.  Free access to the sum of all human knowledge is something that Google could only dream of, so it is only natural that many businesses could find huge potential in both appearing on Wikipedia and finding ways to utilise its content.  It is strange, though, that a free encyclopedia which promotes information sharing under the General Public Licence (GPL) does not yet support RSS feeds for each article to enable third parties to use the wiki's information more easily.

Wikipedia certainly is a goldmine of lists and trivia, but can be lacking some of the fundamental hard facts. All of this is very unencylopedic in nature, and although it can be a great resource, is generally discouraged as a tool for education.

The other problem with the great wiki is controlling what does and doesn't make the cut.  Initially this was never a problem - ideally such a wiki would have infinite capacity and could potentially contain information on everything and everyone.  But ensuring that everything is fact would be a massive undertaking, so the powers to be at wikipedia (consist of a community of people whose primary talent is deleting and disproving articles) established a set of arbitrary and very subjective "notability guidelines".  This means that only things deemed worth reading about should go up there.  This has an obvious popular culture bias and is bound to be a major source of controversy.  Afterall, while some people might find Star Trek's Jean-Luc Picard noteworthy, there are probably a billion people outside of the English speaking world without Internet or television access who quite simply have never heard of the guy or his elaborate universe.

Besides these factors, the fundamental ease in which content can be contributed by novice authors has also been challenged. 

Firstly, wikis suffer from a problem of lack of structure.  Unstructured content places more emphasis on navigation to find information.  Wiki navigation is achieved by way of hyperlinks, but usability generally requires more complex navigation models. 

Secondly, basic formatting for wiki pages, Wiki syntax, started easy enough for anyone to understand, but it has become more and more technical to achieve navigation structures to make the content easier to use such as templates, categories.  Behind each of these complex navigation structures sits an equally complex bit of code required to achieve the fancy stuff which can be daunting to novice users.  So these factors are gradually undermining the notion that Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit.

Thirdly, if anyone has anything that they feel is worth contributing at this stage, their articles will most likely be knocked back by over-zealous Wikipedians who aspire to be content policemen.  This is great for integrity, but it can become counter productive to the wiki as an information tool.

All of these things have led to one of Wikipedia's founders to admit that the concept is fatally flawed and broken beyond repair.  Leading him and many others to launch alternatives, such as Citizendium, which require people to use their real names.  However none of these have been successful, because they generally lack the content that consumers crave.  I often say that an effective wiki should have a symbiotic relationship between content creator and content consumer, and for previously stated reasons, Wikipedia on the other hand is tipping towards the latter, and the perfect balance remains elusive.

But what does all this have to do with e-business you might ask ? 

While businesses might like to capture a lot of information, no business will have a wiki as large as wikipedia, and it is not all doom and gloom.  I'll outline how we can learn from the mistakes of Wikipedia and look at what makes a successful wiki work in a business environment.