Four New Technologies Changing Business, Part Four: Wikis

What’s a Wiki?

The word wiki comes from the Hawaiian wiki wiki, or “quick”. Don’t let the whimsical-sounding name stop you from taking this knowledge-management tool very seriously. Simply, a wiki is an online collection of user-written and user-edited articles arranged by topic. At first read, that doesn’t seem too significant, but notice that a wiki is user-written and user-edited. This is bottom-up, not top-down. In other words, corporate control freaks need not apply. The greatest example of a wiki is without question Wikipedia, an online user-edited encyclopedia. There are many kinds of wikis available; nearly all of them are open source free software.

Here’s a slightly more technical explanation of how it works: wikis require a database on the web server in which to store the articles and user information. A scripting language runs on the web server that allows users to interact with the database through web forms and web pages. Usually the database is the popular open source MySQL; the scripting language is usually PHP. Complete web pages are “assembled” by the scripting language, which integrates data from the database (in this case, articles) into XHTML or HTML. These web pages are sent from the server to your web browser, where you can interact with them.

People log in to the wiki’s administration pages where, based the permission assigned to them, they can perform a variety of writing, editing, or administrative tasks. No computer geeks or web designers are necessary for the creation and maintenance of content, although you might need them to help you get your wiki set up and integrated into your existing intranet. You do have an intranet for your small business, right?

People are well-served by a great variety and number of online self-help systems. They have been a boon to online retailers and service firms of all kinds. The FAQ was an early, primitive form of this attempt at looping user feedback back to the users. Then came the knowledge-base, which is a larger collection of articles that help or inform users. FAQs and knowledge-bases are centrally administered. Many of them are one-way PR streets, in spite of the apparent interaction that is supposed to take place between administrators and users. This is not to say that wikis require no administrators or maintenance; they certainly do, but it can be more hands-off and require far fewer resources and time. This is an important consideration in their favor.

How can a wiki be used in my organization?

There are many potential applications for wikis within organizations both small and large. Here are some examples:

Company policies
SOPs
HR documents
Organizational history and stories
Helpful information for handling infrequent but important situations
Informal “how-to’s”
Biographies and information about important clients or suppliers
Ongoing project/campaign information

Many of these could be done centrally, the old-fashioned way, where someone writes something in Microsoft Word and sends it to someone else for conversion into HTML and for posting on the intranet. For document updates, it’s the same process all over again. It’s unwieldy, inefficient, and inelegant. With a wiki, people are in charge of managing their own content whenever they need to. Documents can be created, updated, and managed through a web interface.

Can wikis benefit my customers, too?

You already know I’m going to say “Yes!” so let me explain how. And in doing so, what we’re going to discover is that wikis may not only be helpful to your customers in a purely utilitarian manner, they may even get your customers to do your best word-of-mouth marketing for you!

People like to help themselves online, but they also like to help each other. Many people are so enthusiastic about a particular product or service that whole related online communities have appeared. Instead of your customers waiting for you to help them via “trouble tickets” or disappointing them with an over-generalized FAQ, let them help each other. They may be doing it in a newsgroup anyway (and if they are, you’d better be involved in those discussions!). Why not show you care by sponsoring such activity yourself? It will be an extremely valuable window into your customers you couldn’t get any other way. If you simply invite and encourage your customers to write “how-to” and helpful tips on a public wiki, they will probably surprise you. If you’re concerned about troublemakers, they can be banned. But make sure you address legitimate concerns effectively before you go editing others’ articles or removing them. And when I say “legitimate,” I mean legitimate from your customers’ viewpoint—not yours.

Now, imagine a potential customer finds your site and begins to explore. What kind of impression do you think will be made on them when they see articles and helpful content written by other customers? They’re going to realize that other people benefit from your organization enough to write about it. They’re going to believe that your organization truly cares about its customers. You couldn’t get better advertising if you tried.

Wiki Resources

Wiki Articles

Wiki Software

Note: Unless you have access to your own web server and know how set these things up, you may want to hire a professional to do it for you. Once installed on your web server and configured, you can run a wiki yourself.