Only a handful of years ago, it was common to hear people laugh at Wikipedia. Anyone can edit it! How could you take it seriously? These days, just as blogs are, wikis are on their way to winning a reputation as serious publishing platforms.
Free hosted wiki provider Wetpaint announced last night that it's now raised a total of $40 million in venture capital. To celebrate this major financial validation of the wiki world, we thought we'd offer a brief survey of some of the most interesting ways that wikis are being put to serious use today.
There are scores and scores of wiki software options around the web, many of which are hosted and available for free. Wikimatrix is one place you can go to compare different options.
Wetpaint in particular features a whole lot of pop-culture crap, but that's where the money is and a return must be secured on $40 million worth of investors' money. Around the rest of the web, though, wikis are used for more than just teen-age starlet fan clubs and rehashing TV show minutia.
Wikis are some of the first online social software that many people in the enterprise come in contact with. They can be very popular for project management work. A recent report from Forrester estimated that enterprises spent $63 million on wikis last year, meaning that the consumer wiki provider Wetpaint has now raised 2/3 as much venture capital as the entire enterprise market spent on the medium last year. Forrester predicts though that by 2013, that spending will grow to $451 million - more than will be spent on blog software, podcasting or widgets.
When thinking about wikis, here are ten use cases that may be useful to consider as you ponder the possibilities. We'll go from the most obvious examples to the most interesting.
If you've got something that you want to throw up on a web page, to see how it renders or to share it with others, a wiki is one of the easiest and fastest ways to do so. Some people use wikis as personal notepads with version history, as well. If it doesn't have to look fancy and you might want to change it quickly later, try putting it on a wiki.
Check out Liz B. Davis's wiki called Integrating 21st Century Tools into Your Teaching, where you can find slideshow and video tutorials about how to start using tools like Del.icio.us, GMail, Ning, Google Docs and more. It's a great example of using a wiki to quickly and easily share some personal knowledge through a very simple publishing platform.
Everyone knows that wikis are good for collaborative writing, but what kinds of things might you write collaboratively? Creative asset management company Extensis uses an internal wiki to craft agreed upon replies to common email inquiries. That sounds like a great time saver and a good way to make sure that day-in-day-out email communication stays helpful, professional and up to date even if it's a snoozer for the people who happen to be sending the replies.
A solution like the SproutIt Mailroom might be more sophisticated, but sometimes you just want something quick and dirty.
Wikis are generally presumed to present nothing but an empty box and a WYSIWYG editor, but that's not always the case. The online community for book readers Shelfari, for example, recently added a section for author wikis. These author wikis are a combination of free text space and a structured, biographical section.
The software used is called DekiWiki, from Mindtouch. Shelfari doesn't use the DekiWiki interface, though, it just ties its pages into DekiWiki services. While Wetpaint Inject is getting some press this week, DekiWiki's API offers more seamless, more powerful integration into partner websites.
A number of popular podcasts have experimented with setting up a wiki for listeners to fill out show notes about each episode of their shows - but that hasn't worked out very well. If you really want a wiki about a performance to be populated, you're going to have to do it yourself.
No one has done a better job of consistently putting up notes from conference talks than Beth Kanter, one of the most respected nonprofit tech consultants on the web. Kanter posts all of her notes here and makes sure everyone in the audiences of the many good talks she gives knows that URL. A particularly good example can be found in the page she set up for a recent talk about using social media for people in the arts. That one includes several examples of live video broadcast from the presentation using Qik.
Beth has blogged extensively about best practices in using wikis, as well.
The widely viewed CommonCraft video called Wikis in Plain English uses event organizing, in this case planning a picnic, as its tutorial example. Sure enough, there are any number of organizations around the world using wikis to organize events.
The Toronto Transit Camp is one example of an attractive event wiki. All of Barcamp, an event organized like a wiki and now spread throughout the world, is organized using wikis.
Even the campaign of President-to-be Barack Obama is using a wiki to organize volunteers for his campaign. See also Clinton Attacks Obama, a unofficial wiki created by Baratunde Thurston to track and analyze the race-based attacks against Obama made by the Clinton campaign.
When talking about Presidential politics these days, it's hard not to talk about disasters both literal and figurative. Wikis come in handy there too. KatrinaHelp.info got better press for being helpful than FEMA did during Katrina.
Now a new group of people is starting to work on a new wiki to gather resources to send to China to aid victims of the Sichuan Earthquake . That project is just in its formative stages but it could use your support. If you haven't been following the quake in China much, there's an interesting perspective on the event in a series of photos taken by a wedding photographer before and after the quake hit.
Can wikis be used to write the news? Only in some cases, but when those succeed they are a real inspiration. The LA Times' infamous experiment turning a 2005 editorial about the Iraq War into a wiki was absurd, but the far more well-informed Wikipedia project called WikiNews appears to be near death as well. If you want to find a good example of a thriving news wiki community, check out the sports site ArmChairGM, one of a number of active sites over at Wikia. The point is, news can be written by wiki - but it's easier said than done.
For all the hot air offered by democratically elected governments about incorporating citizen input into decision making, wikis are emerging as an interesting way to try to make the process of gathering such input real.
The city of Melbourne, Australia launched an official wiki today to discuss the future of the city. I'd love to see the Mayor of my city on the front page of a wiki asking for contributions!
Likewise, the Dharavi Redevelopment Project is using a wiki to gather resources for use in planning redevelopment of one of India's largest areas of hyper-poverty. Wikis don't have to be a privilege touching only the world's wealthiest people.
While wikis are usually thought of as available for public collaboration, they can also be useful in showcasing content developed by a closed group. The Democratic National Committee today unveiled its McCainPedia, a collection of information it's gathering about presumptive Republican Presidential nominee John McCain. Early feedback has included some criticism that the wiki isn't publicly editable, but on the other hand isn't it better to do this closed research in the light of day than not?
Stockholm University's Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry launched a new website this week with the same strategy. The wiki isn't publicly editable, but its members get to use a wiki interface to add content and anyone can view it.
Finally, possibly the most interesting serious use of a wiki that we've seen of late is today's announcement that legacy web developer community WebMonkey has been acquired by Wired.com and is turning all of its archived content into wiki pages. That's a great way to enable a community of users to breathe new life into archived content that is less timely than news stories but could still use some updating.
Wikis are no longer just for fringe articles on obscure topics and they don't have to just be for pop-culture fluff that over-invested companies can run Adsense next to. Wikis are ready for serious work use, if you're ready for them. That's easier said than done, though. Now that we've shared with you a list of examples illustrating the possibilities, we'll leave you with consultant Stewart Mader's excellent recent video tutorial series 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.
We hope you've found this informative and inspiring - we'd love to learn about some of your favorite examples of serious uses of wikis. Check out Mader's tips below and then let's go out and wiki!
Wiki bus photo by CogDogBlog.
Comments
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I totally missed the WebMonkey announcement... I heard it here first! :) Also, "president-to-be"... nice touch! ;)
Posted by: Matt | May 19, 2008 1:56 PM
Here is my blog post that points out to an important consideration when you select a hosted wiki.
http://www.krishworld.com/blog/open-source/how-to-select-a-hosted-wiki/
Posted by: Krish | May 19, 2008 2:06 PM
Hi Marshall,
Wikis are also pretty big in higher education. I have written a report for our faculty members about the use of wikis.
http://copland.udel.edu/~mathieu/wiki/index.html
It might be useful to some of your readers!
Keep up the good work!
Mathieu Plourde, Instructional Designer
University of Delaware
Posted by: Mathieu Plourde | May 19, 2008 2:20 PM
This is a very nice progression for using wikis, from simplest to more complex. I've watched a few of the days of the "21 days..." video and it's instructive. Thanks!
Posted by: Bob Uva | May 19, 2008 2:23 PM
Marshall,
Excellent post! Thanks for featuring 21 Days of Wiki Adoption - what a nice surprise - made my day!
Stewart
Posted by: Stewart Mader | May 19, 2008 2:23 PM
Hey Marshall: Don't forget your handsome neighbors at AboutUs.org. We've taken some pretty significant steps toward making company information publicly available and editable. We have tens of thousands of pages, many of them company pages, that populate our wiki. We're encouraging people to, among other things, think of the site as a "Hoovers on a wiki." (It's like a corned beef on rye.) The difference, of course, is that the information does not come 'from on high.' We populate it, you add, substract, research, opine and what not. What we're aiming at is corporation information in the hands of the customers and vendors, without a doorman.
Posted by: Curt | May 19, 2008 3:53 PM
Great Post! Do you know anything about the rumors going around about WikiPedia trying to go private and for profit?
Posted by: Ben | May 19, 2008 4:00 PM
Loved the article and the video series...it always amazes me that people still think wikis are just a novel idea rather than an amazingly effective platform for tabulating, developing and sharing vital information, real time.
Our company, Creative Citizen, has just launched our public version of The Green Wiki. Here we can develop what is "Green" because as we all recognize, there is a great deal of confusion around this question. Our service is action-based, meaning we foster life improvements rather than just talk.
http://www.creativecitizen.com/
Feel free to email me directly with any feedback you may have: scott at creative citizen dot com
Posted by: Scott | May 19, 2008 4:01 PM
Wetpaint has been doing a bunch of very quick, iterative improvements to their wiki over the past year. It has been quite impressive to watch. Check out my latest review of the Wikia wiki (just posted) here: http://tpgblog.com/2008/05/19/wetpaint-wikis-should-you-dip-in/
Enjoy, share & let me know what you think.
Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com
Posted by: Jeremy Horn | May 19, 2008 4:08 PM
Nice post. I did not see this noted, but Answers.com's Q&A wiki, WikiAnswers was noted by ComScore as the fastest growing site in 2007.
As users become more familiar and comfortable with the concept and use of UGC Wikis will become much more pervasive across the Interweb.
Posted by: Whit | May 19, 2008 4:43 PM
Wow, amazing article, Marshall - lots of great information, in a nice progression from simple to complex.
Do you see more wiki-based sites taking the Shelfari approach in the future, combining both structured information and free-form text? If the idea catches on, then the structured parts could automatically provide a basis for bottom-up semantic web parsing. I suspect that for wikis, this type of information is still in the minority though.
Posted by: NitinK | May 19, 2008 4:54 PM
Hi Marshall -- thanks for the rundown of what's happening in the world of wikis. The big story we've been seeing in the last few years at Wikispaces is the growth of wikis in education. Teachers are quietly (or not so quietly) adopting wikis for their classrooms at a frantic pace. They seem to succeed where heavily structured, top-down classroom management software just hasn't worked.
Posted by: James Byers | May 19, 2008 6:27 PM
Wikipedia has changed the way we look at information. It is amazing to think there was such Controversy over the site.
Posted by: Don | May 19, 2008 6:55 PM
Thanks so much for mentioning my Wiki on your post. It was really easy to put together and a great way to share information quickly and easily. Wikispaces is particularly teacher friendly because they provide ad-free spaces for K-12 educators.
I am honored to be mentioned and linked to in your blog - however, the link is broken. It would be even more awesome if you could fix it:) http://www.21ctools.wikispaces.com
Thanks again.
-Liz
Posted by: Liz Davis | May 19, 2008 8:26 PM
Another great post Marshall, thanks. Where did you find all these samples? How do you do your research?
A couple more wiki use-cases off the top of my head:
- wikis make for the best corporate intranets, hands down
- I think help documentation for software should be in wiki form, so that power users can improve it over time
Another (somewhat obvious) note about wiki software: only those with a WYSIWYG text editor will be successful in the real world. An admin in HR is not going to adopt something if he has to learn crazy mark-up language. Unfortunately wiki software was so bad for so long that I feel it gave the word "wiki" a bad name with some people.
I wish you guys would do a review of the most popular enterprise wikis (the ones people install behind the firewall). I think that at least for the next few years those will be the winners, as corporations are wary of sending their IP to Google let alone 'over-invested' startups. :)
Posted by: Peldi | May 19, 2008 11:24 PM
peldi, thanks for asking. I found many of these examples by searching twitter via summize.com for wiki -wikipedia. That showed me some very timely examples of wikis being discussed right now!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
|
May 19, 2008 11:38 PM
@James, wikis are a very effective educational tool being readily embraced for teaching many different topics, among them foreign languages. Language learning social network italki recently started using wikis as a medium to collaboratively create multimedia foreign language textbooks.
Posted by: Toffler | May 20, 2008 3:07 AM
Marshall,
Thanks for the great article and for mentioning my work! Greetings from Australia!
Posted by: Beth Kanter | May 20, 2008 3:34 AM
Wikis are also increasingly being used by the intelligence community to produce analysis. For an example, you can see my student's product at nie.wikispaces.com.
Kris
Posted by: Kris Wheaton | May 20, 2008 2:23 PM
Wow
Congratulations Wetpaint. I am doing research of wikis and its adoption in the enterprise market. Wikis are here to stay, companies are investing big time in wikis whether it is a for a department or the entire company, whether it is for internal collaboration with employees or external collaboration with the customers and partners. This is no rest for wikis, I read an article a year ago and still so much valid.
Ravi
Posted by: Ravi Govil | May 20, 2008 4:45 PM
When it comes down to the future of wikis, many of the "successful" future wiki products will have to acccomodate many of the features mentioned above as a package. Wikis will be ubiquitious, meaning quite specialized as well, but I don't think only one feature will be the main force responsible for the its success, but rather a good combination of many factors.
More than anything, we've been trying to make wiki "accessible" to everyone with our product, Springnote. The goal is to make it easy, easy, and easy. Which is why we believe we're getting a very good feedback from many of the users. They love it! Our user demograhpics is very young, compared to other some wiki products, meaning it's gotten into the "mainstream" users.
Thanks for the great article!
Posted by: Taewoo Danny Kim | May 21, 2008 11:51 PM
wikipedia is a very interesting website, I like it.
Posted by: Will | May 23, 2008 12:49 AM
Hi Marshall
Great article. One thing you touched on - wikis for events, is I something people tend to overlook but, yeah it is a really effective way of organizing events large and small. Planypus was built exactly around that concept - after a group of friends started using a wiki to organize friday night dinners, we built Planypus to be an event-oriented wiki with rsvps, comments, calendaring, and notifications all centered around planning your event in a wiki space :-)
Posted by: Yan Pritzker | May 25, 2008 11:03 PM
A fantastic article Marshall. Our thanks for mentioning the City of Melbourne's Future Melbourne wiki!
As far as we can tell, this is the first time on this scale that a local government has used wiki technology to enable literally anyone to directly edit the content of a city plan.
In developing the Future Melbourne wiki, we were heavily influenced by the solid standards and procedures developed by Wikipedia. We consider our tagline "the city plan that anyone can edit" to be an almost obligatory 'tip of the hat' to what has grown to be the most influential wiki in the world.
Due to the nature of the project, and the fact that we've pitched the wiki as our primary tool for public consultation, the site needed to be easy easy easy. Usability was front and centre as the most important consideration throughout the wiki design phase. The primary users of the site are the general public, as well as internal and external stakeholders, the vast majority of whom had never seen or used a wiki before. As such, inclusions such as a WYSIWYG editor were paramount.
Beyond the ability to undertake edits to the city's next 10 year plan, we're also attempting to build in additional functionality to encourage ongoing engagement. Features such as video and audio, as well as a creative 'Future Scenarios' section where members of the public can edit, discuss or write their own creative stories of the future.
Again, thanks for the mention. Hope you all have the opportunity to jump across to the Future Melbourne wiki and tell us what you think!
Dale
Future Melbourne Team
Posted by: FutureMelbourne | May 28, 2008 7:13 PM
Great article. I've implemented the Wiki at my current work. I've seen it grow from 20 to 900 users now, and amazed at the trends I've seen. If anyone is interested, Ive documented the Wiki adoption techniques I've seen work.
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Future Melbourne wiki
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