Evaluating Wikis

I'm following up on my post [2] 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 [3] 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 [4] project.



• Project Management and Development are regularly handled by Wikis, such as the Fedora Project [5]



• Wikis make great directories for other media, such as Project Gutenburg [6]'s catalogue of free E-Books.



• A growing trend is use of a Wiki as a company Intranet [7].

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 [8]") 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 [9] platform that track who is working on which section of a book and send out updates.



• TWiki, along with Confluence [10], SocialText [11] 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 [12] (formerly PBWiki) and WikiSpaces [13], in addition to all of the Wikis that you can download and install on your own Server. There are even personal Wikis like TiddlyWiki [14] and ZuluPad [15]. I use a Wiki on my Android phone called WikiNotes [16] for my note-keeping.

Are you already using a Wiki? You might be. Google Docs [17], with it's revision history feature, may look more like a Word processor, but it's a Wiki at heart.