Comments on: Do we really need wikis when we’ve got online docs?

By: Derek Abdinor

Derek Abdinor — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:00:37 +0000

@JoeDamage
the Google-data problem is accurate and something for the risk management committee. I chose Google docs as the poster boy as it has more recognition than Zoho, Trac, Wrike outside the bubble.

To sum up from the comments if I may: software development and IT documentation find Wikis the best available tool for their needs currently. However, both wikis and online docs are not the finished article though. And therefore corporation-wide adoption can not be assumed.

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By: JoeDamage

JoeDamage — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:23:13 +0000

I work in a company where our wiki is the main source of all our procedures and documentation. And I know of at least two other companies that use a wiki in the same way. One of them is a publisher and the other an NGO. The company I work for has the wiki installed locally and uses it across the intranet and VPN. I think you might find wikis much more prevalent than you think… a bit like when everyone discovered to their surprise that their IT staff had been running Linux on that server for ages before you even read about Linus Torvalds… We have looked at a number of technologies for collaboration, including Google’s offerings, but feel that wikis have a specific niche not catered for by spreadsheets or directories of documents. If you look around, you’ll see that some wikis are incredibly extensible, including all sorts of features which add to their usefulness.
I find everyone’s belief in Google’s products a little puzzling. Here you are, keeping your company’s crucial data on a server belonging to another company. They have given no guarantee whatsover that it will always be available to you. In fact, their products are still in Beta. That should be a word of caution already. Surely we should know better than to trust software in Beta? This is not very “Enterprise” at all. Seems dumb to me. Amazon’s compute cloud drops off the face of the Internet now and again, that should be of some concern too…

I think if you look around, the tools used in software development are often at the forefront of collaboration. There are tools like Trac which integrate a wiki into a suite of tools used for development. The point being that the wiki has a very strong position as a collaborative authoring and dissemination system which is relatively unchallenged by online document systems. I think online documents will need to become much more interactive and interlinking to produce the same effect.

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By: jerith

jerith — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:04:55 +0000

@Derek
That depends. We’re a pretty large and diverse organisation. Some teams use the wiki as I described, some don’t. Most teams with software or services consumed by other teams at least have some wiki presence and usually it’s pretty fundamental to their documentation. There are ad-hoc standards, but they’re enforced far more by community pressure than management. If you do things in a silly way, either nobody will find your page and it will die or someone else will come along and improve the situation. Where documentation is lacking, the person who has to dig it up tends to document it or wave pointy sticks in the direction of the nominal owner of whatever it is that isn’t documented.

I think our system works quite well for a widely distributed software development operation. I have no idea how useful other industries or even other corporate cultures would find it. It’s not perfect (but then, what is?) but it does the job for us. The brand of wiki isn’t /that/ important — what matters is that the features we use (templates, categories, extensibility for plugging in better search, etc.) are there. Some teams have different requirements and use different flavours of wiki or different tools.

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By: Derek Abdinor

Derek Abdinor — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:46:29 +0000

@jerith
I reckon your team has some schematics that underpin the wiki: common goal; common project; critical documentation; and probably a schema for the wiki itself.

It clearly works well for you. Do you feel this could be exported to other environments or is unique to yours? And is it the brand of wiki you’re using or not necessarily?

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By: jerith

jerith — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:22:51 +0000

We use a wiki for all our internal documentation. It’s pretty easy to edit, it has a nice balance between persistence and ephemerality and (with a decent search application and sane organisation) easy to find stuff in. All the above assumes a responsible approach toward using the wiki, of course, but then software development requires a responsible approach toward hacking on the codebase.

Essentially, the problem is one of effective communication. A wiki is a tool, and it’s a pretty good general-purpose tool if not perfect for any one thing. Wikitext markup isn’t really all that difficult for someone with a technical background and 90% of it is hardly ever used, anyway. It’s also possible to set up (and easy to use) templates for common snippets, such as live monitoring graphs linking back to the source data.

All in all, a wiki is about the best overall tool for what we use it for.

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By: Derek Abdinor

Derek Abdinor — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:44:16 +0000

@Alice
using email to update the project plan is a good idea, it doesn’t introduce too many new processes. Is there a way to use other channels (IM, microblogs) to update a project?

Disclaimer: I have a wrike account but haven’t played for a while or w/ the enterprise version.

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By: Alice Mc'Lane

Alice Mc'Lane — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:26:11 +0000

Wikis have a lot of potential for collaboration that should not be missed, that’s my opinion. However, we cannot ignore wikis draw backs, like wiki mark-up. I really hate editing stuff in Wikipedia because of that, by the way. Online docs are a great alternative, that can be used for collaboration. But they can hardly be used for project management. There are tools that combine wikis best features and project management features. Ours is one of them. You can chack it, if you get a minute. We’d appreciate your feedback.

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By: Derek Abdinor

Derek Abdinor — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:48:50 +0000

@Bill
Sounds great, but I suspect you have processes/roles/authentication underpinning all that free and open Dionysian collaboration

BTW, massive respect for Atlassian and the tools that you’re bringing into the Enterprise. I think the Sharepoint-Atlassian arrangement was probably the enterprise/office 2 tipping point last year.

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By: Derek Abdinor

Derek Abdinor — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:45:30 +0000

@Ross
Agree: cost-benefit analysis sees Wikipedia scoring massively, even though articles can be defaced from time to time. Well managed, and no Lorem

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By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:52:08 +0000

The wiki is our company’s central nervous system. We use it for blogging, sharing images, dynamic sales dashboards, team spaces, personal spaces and discussion forums. For example, it’s tradition that every new employee writes a blog post to introduce herself to the entire company. Since most other employees subscribe to the personal blog feed, she gets dozens of welcome comments in the first hour. We’ve also pimped out our wiki with plug-ins like Gliffy that lets our business analysts collaboratively create process diagrams and Balsamiq which lets our software developers create GUI mockups inside the wiki. It’s hard to imagine a hosted document editor replacing this platform. Of course, we’re probably at the forefront of wiki adoption since we developed one for ourselves and eventually licensed it to 6,000 other companies:) Stop by our offices in San Francisco or Sydney some time. I’d be happy to give you a tour of our internal Confluence wiki deployment.

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