Why Wikis at Work are Wonderful

Why Wikis at Work are Wonderful

We created a Wiki at CFI some time back and have been seriously filling it with content for the last twelve months. People often mistakenly give me credit for the idea, but it was Jeff Marder’s call over three year’s back when he worked for me on the web team. We’re already reaping the benefits.

I’ve recently gotten access to the Wiki at Highwinds, which is far more mature than the one we have at CFI, but it gives me a great sense of where CFI’s one will go and how much they will rely on it in the future. I’m basically getting a first pass at my new company’s orientation and training, for free, over the Internet, on a weekend. If you don’t have a Wiki at your job regardless of your field, talk to the right sys admin and get one right now.

And as for you lot at CFI: WHY ARE YOU WASTING TIME READING MY BLOG? GET BACK TO WRITING WIKI ARTICLES! :)

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3 Responses to “Why Wikis at Work are Wonderful”

Brian LeGros 08/04/05 19:53

I’ll second the amazing results that occur when you bring a wiki into an organization. At my new position, the first thing I did was introduce a wiki for knowledge retention and sharing. In less than 3 weeks, I’ve got a majority of the knowledge that’s been locked away in the employees’ heads in the wiki. Already there are plans being made to expand the wiki for use with other departments to begin interlinking knowledge within the company. The benefits of a using a wiki are priceless, if only to reduce the use of shared Word docs in a network folder. Other tools such as blogs, RSS, and IM are also other great solutions for simplifying the work behind notifications and internal communication. I can’t see myself working without them now.
Maxim Porges 08/04/06 05:08

Thanks Brian – couldn’t agree more.

I think the hardest part for a company adopting a Wiki is getting over the results of indoctrinated behavior, surely cooked up in a subliminal lab by Microsoft marketing folks: the native instinct of office workers to use Word and network folders to share knowledge.

I find network folders full of knowledge documents particularly useless because you can’t search them easily, and they take longer to open and edit than a Wiki document. Putting things on the network also encourages people to do stupid things like instill network permissions so that certain people can’t edit the documents. The pure simplicity of access and edit-ability of a Wiki really inspires collaboration and collective ownership, which is important when dealing with company-wide documentation.
Cliff Meyers 08/04/08 01:06

Getting a wiki up and running was among the first things I pushed for when starting at my current job. Unfortunately we had a requirement that it be implemented in J2EE and the open source solutions available for that platform are not good. Finally after a couple of months I managed to convince my boss to purchase Confluence and now over a year later it’s become a critical part of the way we do business. We use it internally to share knowledge but it’s also a crucial part of how we gather requirements and collaborate with customers. We are also heavy users of JIRA and Atlassian has really done a nice job with both products. Regardless of the software involved, it’s great to see the wiki fill up with content and see people get excited about collaborating.

3 Responses to “Why Wikis at Work are Wonderful”

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