Collaborative Working With Wikis

The Financial Times has an excellent report on why wikis are an effective collaborative tool for the workplace, quoting examples from three prominent companies ... ... "It helps to think of [a wiki] as a sort of online whiteboard," says Gary Boone, research manager at In the UK, the [At Euan provided some insight into some of the experimental things going on at the BBC where wikis are but one element.] These are good examples indeed of how wikis can be used in the workplace. One disadvantage, though, is that wikis can appear daunting at first in that adding and editing content isn't as simple as, say, doing the same in a Word document. No real HTML code and the choice of formatting is somewhat limited. It reminds me of what creating web pages looked like in the mid 1990s. But, as the FT article comments, the advantages of wikis outweigh most major concerns: Managers do worry that people will deface pages they can edit. Yet if the wiki is located on an intranet, defacement is unlikely for the same reason that staff do not usually scribble profanities on the office whiteboard. Rather, it will allow employees to correct something as trivial as a telephone number without having to contact information technology systems. There is also a safeguard: wikis retain previous versions of documents, allowing versions to be restored. And, if someone does put something offensive on a wiki page, at least you know who did it. If you routinely collaborate with others on creating and editing documents, a wiki is definitely worth considering. On a simple level, it's a far more effective collaborative tool than those Word documents that go around groups and that come back to you with a zillion tracked changes with the text in a rainbow of different colours that makes it almost impossible to see what you're doing. New PR Wiki or the NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.