When times get tough and belts get tight, one of the first things many companies do is begin casting about for ways increase efficiency and raise per-worker productivity. Many businesses turn to free and open-source tools to meet these needs, and at some point in such discussions someone invariably suggests a wiki for some internal project. But the wiki idea often gets rejected soon after it's floated, typically because wikis are perceived to be insecure, inaccurate, or difficult to use; either that, or someone in the discussion has gone the wiki route before, only to see their wiki languish from lack of interest and participation.

These perceptions and experiences that lead companies to reject wikis are rooted in a common problem: the vast majority of the public has formed 100 percent of their expectations about what a wiki can and should be based on the single example of Wikipedia. Few have ever seen wikis used creatively and successfully in a real-life business context, so even when IT professionals attempt to implement wikis in their own companies they lack real experience and good examples to imitate.

As someone who's currently writing a book on wikis (see my bio below), I've talked at length with a number of different organizations about the wiki's role in their business. In this article, I'll share with you some of what I've learned about wikis in the real-world by taking a case-study approach to describing how and why a handful very different organizations are successfully using wikis. After seeing the kinds of things that are being done with wikis, you might be motivated to give the technology a second look.

Wikis and communities: Webworks.com

Like standard websites before them, wikis have grown to be useful in any number of ways, and the potential of the wiki technology is only limited by the imagination of those who use it. But what makes a wiki so powerful for collaboration is that the "anyone can edit" capability means that the development of a wiki is typically driven by the community of people who use it, rather than being mandated and guided from on-high by a centralized IT or by company leadership.

The team at WebWorks.com uses different wikis to support distinct sets of user communities within the company. WebWorks.com first installed a wiki in 2003 to provide a collaborative environment for its software development team to share ideas, and to document and comment on the progress of a product build. A couple of years later, the company's services group chose a different wiki platform to manage projects and collaborate with customers. The company says that the introduction of the wiki made customer communication more efficient by enabling everyone to work from the same information source for troubleshooting and project planning, with the net effect that projects were completed quicker, there were fewer incidents of the project specifications changing, and everyone was kept informed of progress so there were no surprises.

By 2007, the software development wiki had grown and been transformed into the company's "innerwiki," which replaced a static, traditional, Web-based intranet. The wiki became the source for all company information and was treated as the canonical internal document of record. As CEO Tony McDow puts it, "if something isn't on the wiki, it doesn't officially exist."

The same year, WebWorks launched its first public-facing wiki: the WebWorks Help Center, which is aimed at the more active members of its user community. The wiki.webworks.com site is a place for the WebWorks developers and support teams to post content, notes, and general information about the product, and for registered users to post enhancement requests, or even their own projects and ideas, so they can get assistance and feedback from their peers.

A new wiki was then launched the following year in order to assist in the promotion and planning of the company's annual 'RoundUp' users conference. Using a wiki instead of a standard website allowed the conference organizers to monitor and make quick changes to the areas they were responsible for, and it let speakers and exhibitors post their own information and make edits and additions right up until the opening day of the event. A special area of the wiki was set up for conference attendees to take notes and make observations as the event was taking place.

In the last twelve months, the latest WebWorks wiki, docs.webworks.com, was launched as an online destination for all of the company's product documentation. This wiki allows customers, prospects, and any other interested parties to review and comment on the documentation set. WebWorks also developed a technique for linking the product's embedded online help to the wiki documentation so that anyone accessing the online help can immediately see if the topic they are looking at has been updated or commented on in the public wiki.

As I said above: different wikis for different communities, each designed to meet a defined business need.

While the majority of corporate wikis currently reside behind company firewalls, there is a trend toward making them publicly available, as with three of the WebWorks wikis above. But moving a wiki into the public domain tends to immediately raise some concerns about quality and security.

The accuracy issue: Geometrica

There is a common perception that wikis are highly inaccurate; the best-known example of this is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is often criticized for its errors. This is a common misconception, based on the idea that if "anyone" can contribute, the quality of data will suffer because there is no editorial control. But in practice, the opposite tends to happen, especially in wikis that are designed for internal corporate use. Any posted content is not subject to the whims, preferences, or even prejudices of a single editor or manager; it is now subject to the review of the whole community. As a consequence, other subject matter experts within the company can comment, change, and contribute quickly and easily. People with a passion for a particular subject tend to self-police the areas of a wiki covering that subject; they make changes very quickly, and if some misleading or incorrect information is posted then it is instantly challenged and rapidly corrected, with a consequential increase in the quality of the information.

The truth is that a wiki, like any other website, is as open or as secure as you want to make it.

Houston, Texas-based construction company Geometrica experienced this exact result when implementing a wiki-based ISO9000 compliant quality management system.

CEO Francisco Castano explained that originally there was resistance to the wiki due to "the ingrained perceptions about the need for the sequential authoring-editing-approval-publication process and the perception that when a document is published its information is correct, complete, permanent, and authoritative." But when Geometrica allowed every staff member the rights to edit or comment on its wiki, the distinction between author, editor and approver disappeared. Castano pointed out that "because the organization is working towards one goal [in this case ISO 9000 Quality Control Certification], anyone can share ideas, discuss, comment, change, edit, copy and paste as needed. Everyone's skills and knowledge are welcomed."

One unforeseen benefit of this open collaboration was a marked increase in the quality of the documentation being developed on the wiki. The ease of editing meant more people got involved with less effort as barriers to participation, such as knowledge of specialist editing tools, were eliminated. Many small corrections or improvements that might have previously been ignored as being tolerable, if not perfect, tend to get corrected. The aggregation of these many small improvements resulted in significant change, or "wiki magic," as Castano calls it.

Are wikis secure?

The "anyone can edit" philosophy that underpins most wiki implementations leads to the assumption that wikis are inherently insecure and open to vandalism, hacking, and other malicious behavior. This impression is reinforced by the all-too-frequent press reports about vandalism of various high-profile Wikipedia articles (the number of press reports being totally out of proportion to the actual number and frequency of attacks when compared with the actual number of pages on Wikipedia). The truth is that a wiki, like any other website, is as open or as secure as you want to make it.

The Wikipedia model is perhaps the most open, with just a simple, unverified, and automated login required before you can start editing. However, most wikis come with access controls built-in, and they can be set up so that only named individuals (or groups) have access to, or can even view, specific pages. It is also possible to set up wiki pages so that edits aren't allowed and only separate feedback comments can be made (the most common model for documentation wikis).

With the Geometrica wiki project, every contributor was identified by name, and all changes to the wiki were logged by author and timestamp so that the wiki administrator could track page changes by user or date.

Most wikis allow notification of changes to be sent out via RSS feed, which not only lets users interested in a specific topic to be notified when changes are made, but also allows administrators to be made aware of activity on the wiki.

In many ways, wikis are far more secure and manageable than a traditional website. But even before security becomes an issue, you have to consider how you will get people to use the wiki.