I wrote this for a colleague, but here it is for the world.  (At least I think I wrote it – it was a long time ago!)

Why the Wiki?

Typical challenges

It has always been a significant issue for large groups of people to successfully handle the creation, classification and discoverable storage of information.

The barriers for to creating information are many:

• Getting staff to spontaneously document day to day procedures and outcomes is often difficult.
• Staff are often frustrated by overly ornate requirements when creating information and feel efforts are wasted because their work cannot later be found by their peers.
• Most people don’t have the time or the confidence to repeatedly publicize their work to peers or to distribute the information outside of their organisational area.
• What is created is often hidden in directories which are not widely known or frequently accessed.
  Information creation can be compelled by procedure and regulated by process and thus it can become more likely to be created and managed.
  However, as organisational structure and personnel change over time, large quantities of valuable formal documentation are lost in forgotten locations and the organisation is condemned to re-learn, or re-document.

Typical response

The classic method of organising documentation is to use a hierarchical structure based on a shared location using common office productivity tools such as MS Word or MS Excel.
Hierarchical structures provide a mechanism by which large quantities of information can be structured into categories, with each branch offers a greater specialisation of its parent.

It can be argued that this structure however is more a function of the tools at hand since nested directory structures are a fundamental component of personal computing data management. It is no surprise then that this mechanism has become the dominant method for information storage.

The weakness of this approach is thus:

• Not all information fits solely within a single category,
• Categories require the development of an ontology, and its communication and training.
• The same category names are rarely shared by many parties

An alternative response

In contrast to hierarchical directory structures is the concept of hyper linking, a method popularised in the World Wide Web.

The value of hyperlinking, when combined with a co-operative web creation environment results in a Wiki. A Wiki, (meaning Hawaiian for ‘Quickly’) has been described as:

“A solution that values information creation and cooperation over control and categorisation”

Wiki’s offer several advantages over traditional methods of creating and managing information.

• The wiki allows arbitrary relationships between information.
  • A wiki page can be linked to any other wiki page, website or file system resource, allowing associates to be made between topics.
• All content on the the Wiki is version controlled.
  • All wiki content, both wiki pages and attachments are version controlled, allowing you to see the when, who and what of change. Version control also allows the roll back of unwanted change and the recovery of deleted information
• All content on the wiki is time-stamped
  • All changes to the wiki are time-stamped, so the exact time of change is known.
• All content is associated with specific authors.
  • If configured to do so, all content is associated with an authenticated owner.
• The wiki is searchable
  • All content, including attachments, is regularly indexed by the wiki’s inbuilt search engine, allowing relevant content to be discovered by search.
• The wiki can be restricted
  • The creation and viewing of information can be restricted down to the page label specific groups or individuals and by the categories of creation, editing and deletion
• The wiki can store any arbitrary file as an attachment
  • Some content is not suitable to be transcribed into something as basic as Wiki page, such data can be attached to the page by file upload
• The wiki is web accessible
  • The wiki is accessible in a web browser and does not require (nor have) a desktop client.
• The wiki can be reorganised.
  • Because of the nature of the wiki, barrier to re-organisation is low, with pages able to be relocated when needs and structure change.
• The wiki notifies its users of change.
  • The wiki publicizes change, allowing users visiting to see new and changed information
• The wiki allows you to monitor your content
  • The wiki allows you to establish a watch on content and receive email notification if it changes.
• The wiki can assess the frequency of use
  • The wiki has basic inbuilt statistics that allow you to gauge the frequency of use of information.
    With all these benefits in mind, Wiki’s do have some advantages.
    Limitations of the wiki
• The wiki does not offer complex word processing functionality
  • The Wiki is not an appropriate choice for longer (> 1 page) or complex, formal documents.
• A successful Wiki’s is as much a point of view as a tool.
  • Successful use of a Wiki is associated with staff understanding the point of view of ‘impulsive’ documentation creation.
• Wiki’s can appear alarming to those unfamiliar with the concept.
  • Most organisational approaches to information emphasis control and restriction over freedom of action, it can be confronting to some that the Wiki’s default point of view is to allow anyone to create or edit (and this often causes the audit and version control capabilities to be overlooked)