What is a wiki?
A wiki is a collection of Web pages that allow teams to keep, share and update information. As information is updated, everyone on the team gets a notification about the change. People do not have to ask the administrator’s permission to update a wiki’s page, so contributions to it can be made in real time.
The most successful wiki is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an example of how groups of people demonstrate more intelligence than isolated individuals. In contrast to other encyclopedias that were created by closed groups of people, Wikipedia shows a tremendous growth, thanks to the open approach to collaboration. Wikipedia has been created by hundreds of thousands of contributors. Anyone can contribute to any subject in which he or she has expertise. As a result, each of the 10 million articles contains data collected from multiple sources. This makes Wikipedia comprehensive. According to the Nature journal, Wikipedia is ten times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica and roughly the same in accuracy. High-quality articles attract users every day, making Wikipedia one of the most popular and helpful resources on the Web.
How do businesses benefit from wikis?
Thanks to the support of collaboration, wikis have become a popular business tool. Wikis are often used as an alternative to intranets and other classic software platforms for sharing of knowledge. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes a designing structure prior to use, wikis and other enterprise 2.0 software programs allow people to start with one page and then grow it into a comprehensive knowledge base. The growth happens through many simple interactions. One person creates a page, another person corrects it, the third person adds something, and the first person contributes one more piece of information. As a result, you get a shiny wiki page that reflects a common view of the participants on the subject. This process is also known as emergent structures, the pattern of intelligent behaviors that emerge bottom up from people with no or little central control.
Companies use wikis to get more team members involved in project collaboration, for knowledge management, as a Web portal and as a content creation tool. With a wiki, team members can easily access the up-to-date project information and work together on shared documents. For example, a wiki is a good way to store a series of phone scripts for salespeople or a presentation that many departments are contributing to at once. Since everyone is empowered to contribute in real time, using wikis facilitates information exchange and improves team productivity. Ultimately, wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools make companies more agile and, thus, more competitive.
For more information about how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration and technology, such as wikis, to be successful, you can read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.
How you can use Wrike as a wiki
In addition to its inherent project management features, Wrike has the most important wiki features – collaborative editing, revision history, e-mail notifications about changes and links between pages.
Collaborative editing
Wrike’s tasks can be edited by anyone with whom they are shared. Instead of multiple versions of a document kept in different places, you get a single master document (a task) that everybody can access.
Everyone on the team can view, edit and update information easily, at any time. Your team members can discuss requirements, elaborate on product design, create a conference agenda and find solutions to problems. It minimizes the necessity of meetings and calls to update a piece of work. It also saves team members from having to send e-mails with revised documents back and forth, and it releases your team from the nightmare of comparing document versions.
E-mail notifications about changes
The changes are instantly visible to all of the team members online, via e-mail and RSS. This allows you to stay up-do-date and quickly react to the changes.
Revision history
Wiki is generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. That is why most popular wikis have a built-in version control tool. Wrike’s Premium and Enterprise versions provide version control for tasks, so that no original thought is lost. It keeps the information about what changes were made, when they were made and by whom. You can review, compare pairs of revisions and restore tasks to previous versions.
Links between pages.
Information can be easily cross-linked. Each task and folder has a unique hyperlink, so you can refer to it easily.
Wiki features organically fit in to the overall Wrike experience and help Wrike better meet your needs. You get a true project management 2.0 experience, thanks to collaboration brought into the planning process. Compared to traditional project management tools that place the project manager in the center of the project communications, Wrike allows everyone on the team to immediately see the latest updates and contribute to the project plan in real time. This streamlines communications and increases the productivity of your team. Meanwhile, the ability to restore tasks to the previous version at any time allows project manager to keep control firmly in his or her hands.
