Learning about Wikis

After blogs, wikis appear to be the next most important element in the new social computing toolkit (I'm ignoring forums and instant messaging here because they've been around for much longer). Now, while it's possible to explain to people what a blog is -  a wiki is a much tougher proposition. It's one of those things that you just have to see in action, and just get stuck in yourself. It's not dissimilar to explaining skiing to someone who has never tried it - words don't quite get the feeling across adequately - you just have to try it. However I came across an excellent screencast (effectively a narrated demo - more on these in a later article) by Jon Udell, an analyst with US InfoWorld Magazine. In this screencast he describes the history of an entry in Wikipedia on the 'Umlaut used by Heavy Metal Bands' (weird subject I know but it demonstrates the wiki concept really effectively).

I'm still considering the application of wikis to my work, and specifically how clients might use them to engage customers or employees in knowledge sharing activities. I think they probably have a useful role to play and can be really engaging especially when you need to agree a measure of consensus (for example as part of a change management programme). One of the most popular enterprise wiki tools is Socialtext (SAP recently invested in the business).  I plan to look at these tools in more depth in a later entry.

ExLink: Definition of Wiki in Wikipedia

Timeline: 10 days ago an earthquake struck Northern Pakistan/India killing up to 50,00 people. In the UK the Conservative Party is going through yet another leadership election - candidates are David Cameron, David Davis, Kenneth Clarke and Liam Fox. The threat of a bird flu pandemic is unnerving most of Europe.

Comments

[Piers Young]

One of the things we're looking at Templeton is the distinction between conversational and document based approaches.
Blogs/IM etc fall into the conversational, and wikis into the document-based categories.
It's crude (e.g. people will also chat on wikis) but we're finding it useful
Piers

[John Curran]

Piers - this is an interesting line of enquiry. I recently enabled a blog on a learning portal for a client and they get confused bewteen forums and blogs (they'd really struggle with a wiki). Actually when I say 'confused' I don't mean they don't understand the difference but that aren't sure which one to use when. @Do I start a new forum on this topic or do I write a blog and get comments?@ Would be interesting to hear more about your categorisations and also its application.