Don’t limit knowledge flow with Wikis

Tuesday, 9th of March 2010 at 06:02:26 AM

Wiki introduced the paradigm of collective intelligence “that many people can contribute to topic thus enriching the same”. Was popularized by the publicly built encyclopedia the “Wikipedia“. Wikis have become popular as new way of organizing content and sharing knowledge inside enterprises and business. One of the main attraction is that there are many free (Read open source) Wiki applications available e.g Twiki. MediaWiki, PbWiki, etc. But as we found with our own experience and with experience of many of our customers these applications are not user friendly and requires effort to maintain. Wikis have many drawbacks for effective adoption and I am listing a few:

1. Editing content is tricky. The editor has been designed keeping more tech savvy uses (I would say coders) in mind. For e.g. who will remember to use markups like “bold” just to highlight few characters.

2. Firstly you will need an in house IT team (or a outsourced vendor) to configure and setup. Also wikis cannot be customized or I would customization is not for the faint hearted.

3. Very textual and cannot mix multiple type of media. Though some versions do provide plugins to social media sites like Youtube etc.

4. Lacks the social nature popularized by networking applications like twitter and facebook (Web 2.0). As we have seen by experience that recognition and instant gratification are key to success of sharing and collaboration in teams.

So what are the alternatives? Social collaboration platforms (Enterprise 2.0) provide as great alternative to Wikis and solve all the problems listed above while being an effective platform for knowledge sharing. Only few platforms like Injoos provide a way to capture both structured (Read Blog, Documents etc.) and Unstructured (Read discussions, Micro Blogs etc.) in an integrated and seamless manner.