‘Wiki’ May Alter How Employees Work Together
By KARA SWISHER
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Wiki is a Hawaiian word for “quick,” and some say it has the potential to change how the Web is used.
A wiki is a type of Web site that many people can revise, update and append with new information. It’s sort of like a giant bulletin board on an office wall to which employees can pin photos, articles, comments and other things.
A wiki can gather, in one place, the data, knowledge, insight and customer input that’s floating around a company or other organization. And it’s a living document, since workers who are given access to it can make changes constantly.
No elaborate programming skills are needed. Users can simply click an “edit” button to add comments or make changes.
Despite its speedy name, the wiki is not a new idea. It was pioneered in the mid-1990s by a programmer named Ward Cunningham, who wanted to create a platform for freewheeling collaboration in software development. He named his effort WikiWikiWeb. The idea first caught on among other techies, who used wikis to collectively work on engineering projects.
Now, venture capitalists are funding several startups that are attempting to take the idea to a bigger and more lucrative general-business audience. Their goal is to try to solve one of the workplace’s most vexing problems: how to have employees collaborate and communicate better electronically.
Coming up with a good solution to this problem long has been a quest of the tech industry. Big tech companies have responded with heavy-duty collaborative software packages, such as Lotus Notes and Workplace from International Business Machines Corp. These products usually are expensive, controlled from the top and difficult to implement and use. And e-mail — the most common way workers share information — is hard to search, leaves important data deeply buried within it and is highly vulnerable to viruses. Some analysts have dubbed collaboration via e-mail “occupational spam” — endless, time-consuming and often pointless.
Enter the wiki, which has aims to revive the idea of the “writable Web,” which was how the medium itself was originally conceived by many of its earliest proponents. Using simple software, it allows anyone with Web access to post a page of information that is accessible to anyone else in the same group or organization. Others in the group can then modify, enhance or update it. To keep track of changes, old versions are retained. A wiki has been likened by some to a giant digital white board in a constant state of movement and creation.
Until now, most of the development of wiki software has been led by noncommercial, open-source efforts such as TWiki (www.twiki.org), whose free software has been downloaded by tens of thousands of people, who then typically unleash it within companies on their own. “Of course it comes from the bottom, since information technology departments in companies don’t naturally embrace things they perceive they can’t control,” says Peter Thoeny, Twiki’s founder.
But they should, say entrepreneurs who are now trying to improve and streamline wiki software so they can sell it to companies as the collaboration silver bullet.
“People have tried very hard to take fragmented knowledge within corporations and put it somewhere that it can be used, but it’s been an uphill effort,” says Ross Mayfield, founder and chief executive of Socialtext, a Silicon Valley startup that has been leading the drive to sell wiki technology to companies since late 2002 by developing more sophisticated software and services for it. “Our focus is literally to get everyone on the same page.”
This is a big leap from the way the Web is used now, especially within corporations, where static digital documents basically are broadcast from on high to the many over intranets. “Most information is hidden in plain sight, because the way people collaborate using technology is not designed to respond to the way people actually work,” says Joe Kraus, a co-founder of the once-popular consumer Web portal Excite, who is now working on a business-focused wiki company called Jot. “What a wiki does is codify the paths people are already making themselves.”
Getting average people to think about controlling the Web as comfortably as they might an e-mail or a Word document has not been easy. But the rise in popularity of Web logs known as blogs and other “social software” is changing that. Blogging, say wiki proponents, has revived the idea that a Web site can be an ever-changing organism that can be linked with other Web sites to create a larger and more informative picture.
But if the blog is a soloist, a wiki is an orchestra. Not surprisingly, its sound can also be cacophonous if managed incorrectly and can be open to those whose changes are unwelcome or even damaging. That’s why features such as access control, saving of revisions, stressing accountability and encouraging peer review of postings come into play. In addition, most users say an effective wiki must be pruned and weeded regularly to remain manageable.
Jot’s Joe Kraus says that to make wikis more widespread, companies like his and Mr. Mayfield’s must make wiki software simple to integrate into existing applications that workers commonly use, add more features beyond document editing and make it even more enticing for people to deploy them. “People have to perceive that they only need to add a little information in order to get a lot out of it,” says Mr. Kraus.
The prospects of moving wikis into the office are good, especially since they are already working well in nonwork situations, such as the well-known Wikipedia. This free online encyclopedia, compiled since early 2001 by volunteer writers, now has hundreds of thousands of entries, making it bigger than any other encyclopedia.
“Once people try a wiki, they begin to like the idea that they can be empowered, which feeds into the idea of what a good manager does for his employees,” says Wikipedia’s creator, Jimmy Wales, who is now working on creating wiki-generated textbooks. “The Internet started out with a lot of communities coming together and that remains its greatest strength.”
Indeed, the creation of communal fabric is one that a wiki revives, says Clay Shirky, an interactive telecommunications professor at New York University, who has written extensively about the beneficial uses of social software like wikis in the workplace. “It’s got to be a fluid, ongoing conversation to work,” he says, noting that too much emphasis on the Internet has been about attracting giant passive audiences to Web sites over which they have little control. “But suddenly, people are realizing that perhaps the most human value actually occurs in smaller groups.”