Wild Wiki World
Posted on August 1, 2006
Filed Under Open Source/Freeware, Software |
In this electronic world we live in, information is everything. Most businesses and many individuals publish information on the web and businesses in particular that don’t are at a disadvantage to their competition.
Business documentation runs the gambit from policies and procedures to product or service documentation. In an ideal world no one person is entirely responsible for creating documentation and a team effort is much preferred.
Collaboration has been a buzz word in the computer industry for a number of years now. Products have come and gone that promise to make everyone’s lives easier by allowing teams to easily collaborate on projects and documents. Many are still around today.
Software like Microsoft Word for example has included collaboration features for some time. In the ‘Tools’ menu Word offers features that allow a person to track changes and compare documents. Word also includes an option in the ‘File’ menu to send a document by email for review.
Word of course isn’t the only software to offer ways to work together on a project. It is however, typical in that collaboration features are not particularly intuitive and can be difficult to learn.
Recently wikis have been gaining in popularity as a fairly straight forward way to share and collaborate on written material. According to Wikipedia a wiki “is a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration.”
Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) is the world’s largest wiki and is a completely volunteer based online encyclopedia. Anyone can contribute to content at Wikipedia and currently there are some 46,000,000 articles in many different languages.
But wikis don’t end at the world’s largest example. Wiki software is readily available on the web that can be installed on your own network and some can even be hosted by your ISP. For the most part, wiki software is free and there are versions available that run on Windows, Linux, and UNIX.
Wikis can be configured to allow only selected users to edit content, everyone to edit content, and everything in between. The usual wiki markup language can take some getting used but it is very basic and the learning curve is quite gentle.
Typically wikis offer a valuable set of features:
• Content can be published with RSS.
• Content can be easily searched.
• Every change results in a new revision and old revisions can be viewed or restored easily.
• No special software is required as wikis are web based.
• Email alerts can be configured to notify you of changes.
• Who makes changes and when can be easily tracked.
Wikis don’t always fit a business’s need for collaborative software but they can fill a lot of gaps that other solutions leave behind. The price is more often than not right and the features are rich.
If your business could benefit from a wiki, a great place to start is WikiMatrix (http://www.wikimatrix.org) or you could always contact us or your preferred computer service firm.
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