Improving Communication with a Corporate Wiki

If you have used a wiki recently, it's probably to find some interesting tidbit of information in Wikipedia. The largest wiki out there is a perfect example of what happens when you give writers, editors and subject experts around the world the chance to create information.

If you're not familiar with Wikipedia, a wiki is simply a tool that you can use to easily create and share your knowledge on the web, whatever that knowledge may be. Because of their ease-of-use, wikis are catching on the corporate world as well. If you work in a team or on a project, you will find that a wiki makes it much easier to work together.

The Old Way: Write, Rinse, Repeat

Before the wiki, collaborating on a project charter, for example, could consume an extraordinary amount of time. In my workplace you would use Microsoft Word to write a draft of the charter. Then you would attach the charter to an email, which you would send out to a dozen or so colleagues to review. Your colleagues review it, and then send you their comments and revisions. All of a sudden you are inundated with a dozen different charters in your Inbox. You have to review comments, combine revisions, send out another batch for review, and then repeat.

Frustrating as that is, what happens when you “finish” the charter? Likely a month or more will pass and you’ll get that dreaded last minute Friday request from your manager to see the “latest version.” Not remembering where you put it, you’ll scour email chains and search through your broken memories fighting off a feeling of impending doom. There has got to be a better way, and there is: enter the wiki!

Do It Once And Share

Looking at that previous example, one of the biggest problems is that there are multiple copies and versions that need to be combined and managed. With long email chains and so many files, even the most organized person is likely to lose an important idea or comment along the way. Wouldn’t it be nice to manage just one version that your colleagues could see from anywhere in the world at any time?

The wiki allows you to do just that. With the charter example, everything happens in the wiki. You would first create create a team charter page. You type up the charter and “save” it, which publishes it online instead of saving it to a file. Rather than sending out an attachment to your colleagues, you send out a link to the page. Your colleagues log in to the wiki and either make comments or revise the page themselves.

There’s no email chain, because the comments are all on the page. Whenever a change is made, a history of that change is stored in the wiki. You can go back and revert to previous versions at any time. Best of all, because the charter is online, your colleagues always can access the most up-to-date version.

Compared to what you can develop, a charter is simple. You can use the wiki to develop training manuals, capture meta data, write procedures and policies, project plans, and more.

Write it in the wiki, change it in the wiki, and share it in the wiki. Everything is centralized, and always available.

Collaborative Possibilities for the Enterprise

In my previous life as a technical writer, we used applications like Microsoft Word, Adobe Framemaker, and Adobe RoboHelp to produce our print and online documentation.

Although the wiki is not a replacement for these applications, what it does do is to provide a framework for a knowledge repository. As an editor, I would have loved the ability to see work in progress and to be able to comment on it at anytime. As a writer, I wouldn't have appreciated my editor poking around in my writing like that, so I would have restricted the page until it was ready. Depending on the wiki – and there are different flavors – I would have both of these options at my disposal.

For corporate style guide managers, the wiki can be a perfect tool. If your wiki supports templating, within minutes you can set up a glossary or style guide that is enterprise wide. The wiki is close to ideal for capturing the structured and unstructured meta data of your organization.

I will provide some references for setting up your own wiki in a future article, but if you're adventurous and want to learn more about wikis, check out the king of wikis, Wikipedia. Happy wiki adventures!

Additional Resources

• Wiki Matrix - Great place for checking out different wikis
• Open-source CMS - Preview demos of some wikis as well as other open-source content management systems