Internet Changes Everything

The wiki shall inherit the earth

ITBusiness.ca

6/22/2005 5:00:00 PM - How collaboration technology can build walls between us

by Shane Schick

No one wants to admit they once thought a failed project had merit, but I will. The Los Angeles Times’ use of collaboration software to let readers rewrite its editorials online was an iconoclastic, provocative idea that could have changed the relationship between a publication and its
audience. And in a way, it did: it reinforced the notion that some barriers are there for a reason.

After only a couple of days of publishing what it called “wikitorials,” the L.A. Times shut the project down earlier this week. Instead of making changes that sharpened the newspaper’s argument or raised the overall level of debate, editors were dismayed to see readers flood the site with foul language and pornographic images. The fallout from this hasty retreat may be that wikis (databases based on server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any browser) will be considered to dangerous to be used for idea sharing. This would be a mistake, particularly for IT managers who haven’t yet explored it.

Though the earliest known wiki -- an acronym which stands for “what I know is,” yet for some reason is always written in lower-case -- was started 10 years ago by the Portland Pattern Repository, wikis are only slowly coming of age. This is in large part due to the success of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that has compiled more than 600,000 entries in English from various contributors. The application of wikis outside the general Web surfing community, however, has been limited so far. As a way of sharing ideas online, wikis remain deep in the shadow of blogs, which may explain some companies’ hesitation to set them up. The ethical, legal and public relations around corporate blogging have kept some enterprise executives busy enough this year. They probably see wikis, if they’ve even heard of them, as a free-for-all that could be even harder to control.

Where the L.A. Times might have opened the floodgates a little too wide, corporate wikis on, say, an intranet could become a useful way of discussing, debating and educating the workforce. I’m not the only person to think of this, naturally, and there are plently of software tools available to get started. The key decision will be which areas of the organization should be exposed to wikis, and what kind of content they could collect.

You wouldn’t necessary want to apply an open editing process to your IT security policy, for example, but perhaps users would benefit from an online resource about best practices around data protection and backup. Within the IT department itself, wikis could be used as a tool for improved asset management, allowing for a sort of encyclopedic catalogue of each asset along with updatable details about configurations and licence expiry dates. In some cases, wikis could be opened up to partner or supplier portals, allowing third parties to keep a running log of joint projects. Unlike blogs, which in some cases become a glorified branding exercise, wikis are a form of two-way communication that appeals to the vested interests of everyone involved. They are by nature only as useful as what gets contributed to them.

If you want to gauge the power of wikis, why not try this test: set up a page which offers your definition of IT’s role within the corporation. Then invite colleagues from other departments, including the CEO, to openly edit it. Employees, like the L.A. Times’ readership, could end up using wikis the way they do suggestion boxes, filling it with trash instead of good ideas. The difference with wikis is that everyone, in some sense, owns the box. We all have to live with what’s inside it.

June 22, 2005 at 08:33 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home