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Wikis in Enterprises
Collaborative Working in Enterprise Environments using Wikis
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Wikis
A wiki is a website which allows the user not only to read the pages, but directly edit its content. The uncommon name stems from Hawaiian - WikiWiki means "quick" - and the name outlines the main advantages of wikis: A new user needs none or only a few minutes for orientation, they are uncomplicated and changes are shown direcly after saving. Contrary to many complex knowledge management systems, one's reluctance is easily overcome and employees can be easily motivated to contribute their knowledge. The most known wiki is the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Systems / Software
There are many different wiki systems on the market. Besides commercial products like Confluence, JotSpot or Socialtext numerous open source programms exist – the most known software certainly is MediaWiki which operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
You can find a comprehensive overview and a facility to compare the different software products at WikiMatrix, a service by the German software firm CosmoCode.
Typical wiki functionality
The majority of wiki systems have some basic common features:
- Edit function
- Wiki syntax
- Version history
- Discussion pages
The edit function shows a link on each page of the webseite, which allows the user to access the contents of the page via his web browser in an edit view where he can directly change it.
The Wiki syntax is an easy (non standard) description language which allows to format texts italic or bold, add links or define headings. Modern wiki systems increasingly offer the posibility to embedd a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get editor), so the edit of the pages is rather comparable to the use of a wordprocessor than creating HTML pages.
All changes to a page are saved and all version are accessible in full text through the version history. This versioning not only allows to review the evolution of a document, but also provides the possibility to revert a document to a previous version with the press of a single button.
Some systems add a corresponding discussion page to each page which allows discussions about the content without interfering with the actual content.
Access control
Originally wikis were open to anyone including anonymous users. Especially in enterprises this total openess often is not desired. Some of the current systems have sophisticated access control which are able to give read, write or delete rights to single users or groups down to single pages. Users can be authorized and logged in via in-house directory services with LDAP integration.
