Collaboration Tools Part 1: A Wiki for Your Team

Author’s Note: This writeup is the first in a short series investigating different types of online collaboration tools that you can use to help your organization grow and learn. Click here to browse the entire “Collaboration Tools” series.

What is a wiki? Do you need one?
I mentioned in my last post that I set up a workplace wiki in hopes of capturing tacit knowledge and sharing it amongst teammates. Let’s start off with a quick definition: a wiki is “a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.” (source: Wikipedia) Thanks to freely available online resources you too can share what you learn and create with your teammates. Hopefully they will even reciprocate! If you build a wiki then you should encourage all members of your team to contribute to it because the wiki is not a traditional one-way broadcast like a newsletter or a television program. The wiki is a collection of living documents representing the thoughts and efforts of many different people.

Front page of my team’s wiki

The power of the wiki lies in its grassroots communication philosophy. As more and more teammates refer to and even contribute to an online body of knowledge, its value to everyone increases. This allows for a group to efficiently flesh out a collective understanding of problems and relevant information. A site like my team’s wiki (pictured at right) can be useful to non-contributing readers due to its wealth of interconnected information about the team’s operations.

How does a wiki work?
Wikis use something called “simplified markup” to provide a user-friendly look that retains some powerful formatting tools. This markup text is supposed to look like plain English (or any other language) with some formatting characters thrown in. To make a section of text appear in bold, you might brace it with *asterisks*. To italicize another section, you might wrap it in ‘quote marks’. Links to other wiki pages are usually made using square brackets. [[Main Page]] might insert a link to the main page of your wiki. Once you’ve written up your formatted text (and hopefully sprinkled it liberally with related links), you can submit the form and the Wiki application will show your new content as a web page. Your formatted text should show up on the page as the intended bolded, italicized, linked, or other text.

Editing a wiki page

As users continue adding new pages to the wiki and linking them back to existing pages, the wiki quickly takes form as a tightly linked mesh of related documents. A search box is usually provided to fill in the gaps when users are inconsistent with naming and linking patterns.

Where can I try one?
While my team wiki is run in-house I recommend a first timer take advantage of a free wiki hosted by a 3rd party on the web. Some popular options:

• Free online office suite Zoho offers a quick setup augmented by the fact that users can log in with existing Google or Yahoo accounts. For rapid user adoption, this might be a winner.
• Wikia is brought to you by the people who created Wikipedia, by far the most well-known wiki. This might make your users more comfortable if they have used Wikipedia before. The apparent downside here is that Wikia actually vets new account requests rather than approving anyone instantly.
• Wikidot has a slick look and open source credentials. If either of these interest you, check it out.
• Wetpaint has been used to power some popular marketing wikis like the ones Showtime is using to build communities around popular shows The L Word and Weeds.

How do I choose the right free wiki for my team?
Try these wiki comparison resources: The comparison of wiki farms on Wikipedia offers a straightforward list of several major wikis and pricing information. If this is insufficient you can refer to the incredibly detailed Wiki chooser on WikiMatrix. Use that if you have a particular feature set you require out of your wiki. Remember though that if need complete control over your wiki’s style and content you might need to set up and run your own in-house. If you have a bit of network administrative knowhow and want to test your own wiki in a cleanroom environment then I recommend this Wikimedia ‘Jumpbox’ that can be run in a free VMWare player. If you are just interested in testing a free online wiki then any of the ones listed above should suffice but I think Zoho will be the quickest to set up.

• Wikis for collaborative projects (slideshare.net)
• TC50: FluidHtml builds a more web-friendly version of Flash (games.venturebeat.com)
• Guild Wars 2 Hype Machine Rumbles To Life [Ncsoft] (kotaku.com)