September 29, 2005

Using A Wiki For Managing Content

A Wiki is a tool that lets users post content to the Internet but enables anyone to make changes as well. Sounds confusing? Not really. Imagine posting a corporate handbook to your company's web site. Instead of asking for comments and revisions and then doing them yourself, you can enable you employees to make changes. Changes you like you keep, changes you don't like you reject and put back the original text.

While blogging has become a powerful tool to enable anyone to have a voice, Wiki's are a powerful tool to let anyone be an editor.

Popular web site Wikipedia has an index of thousands of articles contributed by a loose group of writers. The interesting thing is that anyone can make changes. Since there's so many people using Wikipedia the online encyclopedia is accurate and correct due to the power of the number of people editing it.

Think of the TV show, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire". I would guess that most everytime when you use the "ask the audience" for help option you are right. The power of thousands compared to the power of 1 or 10 is so much different.

Wiki's are not for everyone. Cnet writes Wales pointed to a recent experiment in which The Los Angeles Times tried a "wikitorial" in which its readers could collaboratively work on editorials.

"It was more or less a complete disaster," Wales said, "because they didn't have a community built up, so they just had tons and tons of random people (involved). They had to take it down because there was too much vandalism."

Want your own Wiki, just do a Google search and you'll be referred to many resources.

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