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Menu Presentations / The Business Case For Wikis And Other Collaborative Tools

Q. How many Wiki people does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. One, but anyone can change it back.

(from langreiter.com)

What are wikis and how do they work?

  • Video: Wikis in Plain English
  • A wiki is a piece of server-based software that enables the user to edit a web page via the web browser. There are many variations in terms of types of wikis. A common feature is the easy creation of new wiki “pages” by combining words to form a web link to a new document. Most wikis include a basic shorthand so that users can create web documents without needing to know HTML.
  • The most well-known and largest example of a wiki is probably Wikipedia—a vast web-based encyclopedia. Wikipedia is being developed and managed by a large group of vigilant contributors from around the globe. It is the largest written "document" in the history of civilization.

Here's a nice presentation by Brian Lamb introducing wikis. In a wiki, of course.

There are many other types of wikis.

  1. Wikipedia
  2. Wikibooks
  3. Wikiquote
  4. Wiki-How. How to do stuff.
  5. Psychology Wiki
  6. Martindale course wiki
  7. EduTech Wiki, all about educational technology, from the Unversity of Geneva
  8. Sloan-C wiki about online teaching and learning. Fantastic resource.
  9. http://www.complexive.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page -- a wiki used to organize a corporate e-learning conference in Nov. 2007.

General articles about using a wiki

  1. Seven things you should know about wikis
  2. Executive's Guide to Blogs, Wikis, and RSS (PDF)
  3. Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not
  4. Wikipatterns: a wiki book about patterns of how wikis are adopted, and how people respond. Very interesting.

Bonus: papers from the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis

Wikis as tools for teaching, collaboration, project management, and knowledge management

  1. Case Study: Using a Wiki for Documentation and Collaborative Authoring
  2. Growing Collection of Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories from Bill Ives
  3. Using wikis on an intranet, from the British Council.
  4. Wikis a disruptive innovation, (about knowledge management
  • wiki as an alternative to email (learners put links to their blogs or resources on a wiki rather than email them all to you)
  • shared to-do lists
  • writing an book or procedure manual using a wiki - distributed error checking

Problems: Security, vandalism, and version control

  1. Wikis are easy to vandalize. Even easier to fix.
  2. Some wikis enable users to receive email or RSS notifications of changes. Or to create a "watch list" of pages.
  3. Soft security vs. hard security.

How to start a wiki

  1. Setting up a wiki, from opencontent.org

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science/How_to_start_a_Wiki

Choosing a wiki

  1. Wiki Matrix -- one site to compare them all.
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

Free wikis:

Hosted:

Host yourself

Companies selling "enterprise" social software services

  1. http://www.xerceo.com/web/guest/about
  2. Atlassian Confluence
  3. Google Sites (formerly JotSpot)

Handy wiki tools

  1. http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/html2wiki/ -- convert HTML to wiki markup.
  2. Tiddlywiki--your personal nonlinear notebook.

Other Collaborative Writing Tools

  1. Zoho: collaborative everything.
  2. Google Docs collaborative word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.