Evaluating Wikis

This post originally appeared on the Idealware Blog in August of 2009.

I’m following up on my post suggesting that Wikis should be grabbing a portion of the market from word processors. Wikis are convenient collaborative editing platforms that remove a lot of the legacy awkwardness that traditional editing software brings to writing for the web.  Gone are useless print formatting functions like pagination and margins; huge file sizes; and the need to email around multiple versions of the same document.

There are a lot of use cases for Wikis:

• We can all thank Wikipedia for bringing the excellent crowd-sourced knowledgebase functionality to broad attention.  Closer to home we can see great use of this at the We Are Media Wiki, where NTEN and friends share best practices around social media and nonprofits.
• Collaborative authoring is another natural use, illustrated beautifully by the Floss Manuals project.
• Project Management and Development are regularly handled by Wikis, such as the Fedora Project
• Wikis make great directories for other media, such as Project Gutenburg‘s catalogue of free E-Books.
• A growing trend is use of a Wiki as a company Intranet.

Almost any popular Wiki software will support the basic functionality of providing user-editable web pages with some formatting capability and a method (such as “CamelCase“) to signify text that should be a link.  But Wikis have been exploding with additional functionality that ramps up their suitability for all sorts of tasks:

• The Floss Manuals team wrote extensions for the Open Source TWiki platform that track who is working on which section of a book and send out updates.
• TWiki, along with Confluence, SocialText and other platforms, include (either natively or via an optional plugin) tabular data — spreadsheet like pages for tracking lists and numeric information. This can really beef up the value of a Wiki as an Intranet or Project Management application.
• TWiki and others include built-in form generators, allowing you to better track information and interact with Wiki users.
• And, of course, the more advanced Wikis are building in social networking features.  Most Wikis support RSS, allowing you to subscribe to page revisions. But newer platforms are adding status updates and Twitter-like functionality.
• Before choosing a Wiki platform, ask yourself some key questions:
• Do you need granular security? Advanced Wikis have full-blown user and group-based security and authentication features, much like a standard CMS.
• Should the data be stored in a database? It might be useful or even critical for integration with other systems.
• Does it belong on a local server, or in the cloud? There are plenty of great hosted Wikis, like PBWorks (formerly PBWiki) and WikiSpaces, in addition to all of the Wikis that you can download and install on your own Server.  There are even personal Wikis like TiddlyWiki and ZuluPad.  I use a Wiki on my Android phone called WikiNotes for my note-keeping.

Are you already using a Wiki?  You might be. Google Docs, with it’s revision history feature, may look more like a Word processor, but it’s a Wiki at heart.