Nearly two years since InfoWorld proclaimed 2004 the “Year of the Enterprise Wiki,” wiki technology is still a nascent, but promising addition to most enterprise intranets.
Few organizations use wikis, though they are becoming more common place.
Helping the wiki increase in popularity is no doubt the resemblance to and the blurring of the line that separates this budding technology from the content management system (CMS).
“A wiki is a collaborative website where users can create and edit pages. Wikis fall conceptually under the broad concept of content management, and you could certainly use your existing CMS to create a wiki-like site,” writes consultant Mark Choate in What makes an enterprise wiki? “However, wikis bring unique characteristics that differentiate them from a run-of-the-mill content management systems.”
Wikis are certainly less complex and less rigid in term of workflow and structure. However, wiki technology is advancing. The explosive popularity of Wikipedia.com (now in the top 10 most visited websites on the planet with nearing 1 million articles and thousands of active contributors) underscores the power of wiki technology.
UC Davis has a student-run Wiki at www.DavisWiki.org. According to its own statistics DavisWiki.org has 2,502 registered users with 7,031 pages covering topics such as “on-campus bathrooms,” “self-defense” and “good ideas for dates” (the latter sometime relating to the former topics).
Wikis are certainly less complex and less rigid in term of workflow and structure. However, wiki technology is advancing.
A good case study featuring a wiki-based intranet platform:
Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking
Read more on What makes an enterprise wiki? on www.CMSWatch.com.
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