Sometimes people confuse the concept of wiki and blog.
A blog is a journal that is usually contributed to by one person or a small collection and others can then leave comments about the entries.
A wiki is collaborated on by any number of people.

Businesses are catching on to the power of collaborative publishing and using wikis more and more for their intranets allowing staff to build the intranet and knowledge management systems. It is hard to contain the excitement that such a tool gives me!

How often have I seen the problem of one person or a select few holding volumes of corporate knowledge that is difficult to share with newer staff members. You can’t just sit a new person down and fill them with many years of accumulated knowledge and expect them to have any level of understanding similar.

You can however encourage staff to build a knowledge system.

Anyone needing this information then has a way to ‘find it’ even if the originator of that information has left.

I have seen prosperous companies go on a huge decline simply through the loss of corporate memory - the leaving of long-term staff.

Policy and procedure manuals are often seen as dull on their own and though many companies have them, they are often for the purpose of passing an audit and often not really used.

A wiki can provide an interactive manual and one beauty is that anyone can update the manual when needed and everyone immediately has the latest information. Yes this is true of the staff intranet, but if you are relying on a select few staff with the web design skills and software, or on an outside contractor there is not enough momentum.

If staff can update with little technical skill, and the result is immediate, then momentum can be easily initiated and we all know that momentum is easier to maintain once it has taken off.

Wiki’s can be hosted either by a wiki provider, or on your own server.
For example the server I use here includes Fantastico (and what a perfect name!) which includes the ability to host your own wiki, just like I host this blog.

Go WIKI

How to Wiki - a huge compendium of ‘how to information’ in a wiki

Wiki spaces - a great free wiki host

Wiki Wiki Web - the first wiki

And of course I couldn’t leave out Wikipedias say so on the wiki

Any idea what a wiki is?
I’m willing to bet that you use them online fairly often.

Often you don’t actually know what platform you are using when you visit sites on the internet, just as you probably have no idea what internal structure might be inside a particular building.

The most famous wiki is probably Wikipedia.

However, a wiki is not an encyclopedia, though Wikipedia is.
Hmmm let’s start again hey, and I’ll just explain what a wiki is.

A wiki is a page or site that is designed to allow anyone who accesses it to contribute to or change the content.
Wiki’s use their own design editors (markup language) and are exciting as they encourage the democratic use of the web to create collaborative websites (open editing).

WikiWikiWeb was the first site to be named a wiki.  It first  became available in 1995 and now hosts tens of thousands of pages.  The design was inspired by Apple’s HyperCard, which are virtual card stacks linked to each other, allowing users to comment on and change them.
Today companies use wikis instead of intranets (internal web sites for staff only information) as all staff can update the information instead of relying on a web designer.  The power of this is recognised that knowledge is constructed and built on others previous knowledge.  Time is used efficiently as additions and edits can be achieved on the fly and in small bites.
Users only need a web browser (like IE or Firefox) and relatively little knowledge of wiki principles to begin publishing.

An important aspect of the wiki is that it is designed to be continually changed through collaboration, rather than appear great to a first time visitor.

Wiki’s can be private and only allow registered users to make changes, to prevent pages being destroyed by jokers.