When one thinks of wikis, the layout of Wikipedia inevitably comes to mind: grey and blue on white, navigation bar and tool box to the left, a few tabs situated above a rather text-heavy page. Immediately, people recognize a wiki by this appearance that has been moulded by the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

At the same time, one will inevitably fail to understand the essence of wikis if one thinks of it as a generic piece of software: It was not the software, but the wiki principles that have transformed and revolutionized the sphere of content creation and organisation. There is more to learn about wikis:

• On a wiki, anyone can edit:
  The core principle is that there are no access restrictions or strict hierarchies on the content of a wiki. Anyone can easily contribute his or her own knowledge, his or her own ideas, and his or her own content.
• Wikis are easy to use:
  Anyone who is sufficiently familiar with the basic functionalities of word processing software (write, delete, save) has all the skills required to edit, correct and expand a wiki. 
• Wiki content is linkable:
  By allowing users to create links between words and as such between concepts, wikis also allow for the creation of semantic relations, i.e. of meaning.
• Wikis support versioning:
  Never does information disappear on a wiki. If a page is edited, the previous version is still stored somewhere. This has an important psychological effect as it takes away the wiki writer’s block: the fear that something might get lost through editing.
• Wikis support all media:
  Wikis are web-based. So whichever type of content you have, be it text, images, audio, spreadsheets, documents – anything that can be displayed in a web browser can be displayed in a wiki. And even if a file of a rare format cannot be displayed in the browser itself, it can still be downloaded.

Within the wiki world, no user is above or below another with regard to one principle: Anyone can edit. And as the wiki philosophy did away with the gatekeepers (traditionally: journalists, editors, publishers), it also opened its gates to the forces of chaos. To keep those forces under control, the wiki world relies on the wisdom of many. Or, as the saying named Linus Torvalds’ law goes: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

While Wikipedia is the outstanding example that this is indeed true, a knowledge management strategy within a company can impossibly recruit as many active users as Wikipedia. In the era of the attention economy, one of the biggest motivations for users to contribute to social media is to receive attention and recognition for what they are doing – a force that can and must be harnessed for one’s own knowledge management efforts.

Integrating a social component is therefore one of the aims of the KiWi project. Communal knowledge that is generated collaboratively by a group of people with shared tasks and similar interests is always going to be superior to any isolated expert’s advice when it comes to reflecting the topics, challenges, questions and answers that are relevant to this particular group. And unlike many corporate KM systems, a wiki is not bound by the restraints of a too complex or hierarchical workflow design: Anyone can ‘be the boss’ and have the last say – if only for a fleeting moment, until the horizon of shared knowledge expands and the wiki is edited again.

Next article in this section:

Keeping structures flexible with and on the Semantic Web 

Image by Pfctdayelise on Wiki Commons