My wife works for the Travis County local government here in central Texas, and one of the highlights of her job is helping to organize the county’s annual History Day. Last year marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of William B. Travis, one of the heroes of the Alamo and the man Travis County was named for. When she told me about the organizational task her team had ahead of it, I suggested that they consider using a wiki to pull all the various aspects of the History Day planning together.
Unfortunately, the response from the county’s IT group and others on the team was that they didn’t need an online encyclopedia. They had equated the word wiki with its most famous and obvious example – Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is, of course, just one particular example of one style of implementation of one specific wiki platform and is not representative of the overall capabilities of wikis.
Remember, a wiki is a web page that anyone can edit directly in the browser without needing a separate editing tool.
So if that’s all a wiki is, how could one have helped my wife’s team?
First and foremost, wikis are collaboration tools. Allowing members of a team to edit a shared collection of web pages provides them with a shared workspace that can easily be accessed from any computer and is visible to any team member with access rights to view the pages.
It is worth remembering that even though a wiki has the capability to be so open that literally anyone can edit it, that is rarely a good practice. Wikis work best when team members need a login and password to access the wiki, and when different permissions are set depending on each member’s needs and role in the team. A well set-up and defined wiki becomes a virtual white board and meeting space.
A wiki, like Wikipedia, can be a knowledge capture and collection point. The History Day team was overloaded with documents and information on Travis that proved to be difficult to track and to consolidate. Bringing them together in a wiki space would have simplified the task. The team could have given permission to outside experts on the life of Travis and the history of the county to contribute directly to the wiki.
The promotional fliers and other public documents related to the History Day were produced, like the majority of business documents, in Microsoft Word and then circulated for review. As a result the document authors had to consolidate feedback and comments from multiple reviewers, not only on the team, but from other county officials and their legal counsels.
With the documents online in a wiki, each reviewer could have either made changes directly in the document or added comments that others could have seen. By allowing all reviewers to see others’ changes, duplication of effort would also be reduced.
Most wikis also have some degree of document management built into them. This means you can store different versions of the same document so you can track what changes were made and who made them. You can also control who has access to particular documents and whether they can just read them or are allowed to make changes. Using a wiki’s built-in document management tools would allow any earlier version to be recreated if needed.
The exhibit included many old photographs and documents, including Travis’ famous “Victory or Death” letter from the Alamo, all of which had been scanned for archival purposes. Putting the electronic copies on the wiki would have allowed all members of the team to comment on which ones to use and how they should be displayed (something that was under discussion right up until the morning of the event). This might have helped create a more consistent exhibit.
The floor space in the county court house allocated for the History Day event was changed this year, meaning that the team had to do some last minute reworking of where the displays would be placed. Having floor plans on the wiki would have given more time to review and think about placement instead of having to cram the decision making into one hastily convened meeting.
A wiki is a great place to set up a contacts directory for any team, company, or organization. Each person can keep his or her own information up-to-date, and central administration is quick and easy. The directory can also add links to email clients, webpages, or even a person’s home page in the wiki itself.
Most wikis use a simple markup language, called wikitext, that is easy to convert to HTML on export, and some wikis allow the use of HTML tags in their content. That way information developed collaboratively by a team on a wiki can easily be extracted and posted on a more traditional, static website.
By making parts of the wiki open to the public, attendees at the History Day event could have had access to research notes and additional information about the subject and the display items to further complement the information on the display boards.
A wiki is a great way to capture procedural notes and ideas during the planning and running of an event. These can then be used in following years to review and plan for follow up events. This sort of interactive ongoing knowledge capture avoids reinventing the wheel and also makes it easier to transition new people on to the team.
Traditionally, planning for this event starts a few months before the scheduled date and becomes a concentrated effort over a short period that distracts the team members from their main tasks. By keeping a project wiki available throughout the year, items could be addressed earlier and ideas contributed on an ongoing basis, making the actual planning less stressful.
With a well-designed wiki a lot of the collaboration that takes place in time-consuming meetings takes place online. This way it is easier for people to contribute when they have time, rather than trying to make time. Also contributors no longer have to be physically co-located or travel for planning meetings. When meetings are held, they are more productive as a lot of the preparation work has already been done online.
Holding open discussions on the wiki also decreases email traffic and helps eliminate multiple email threads where a single topic may spawn multiple parallel conversations. In fact, one of the hardest things to do in email is simply organize a meeting. Posting suggested dates and times on the wiki and having people comment there can save a lot of email traffic.
Space on the wiki could also have been set aside for publishing photographs, press reports, and even a few “vox pop” style interviews with attendees. These would act both as a record of the event and as something that could be used to attract interest in next year’s event.
By making some areas of the wiki open to the Internet, it could then be indexed by search engines. If a wiki includes a blogging feature, then search engines will tend to rank it higher in results. Once again this would attract visitors and build awareness of the event.
In short, the History Day team could have used a simple wiki as all of the following:
That’s a lot more than just an “online encyclopedia.”
Does the scenario above sound familiar? Are you also looking for a way to increase team collaboration and manage your company’s knowledge? Do you need a way to manage projects with customers or suppliers outside your company firewall? Would you like your customers to provide feedback on the information you publish?
Then a wiki might be just what you are looking for.
Perhaps you have already decided that you should use a wiki, but are not sure how to go about it. Maybe you have a wiki but would like to encourage more people to use it. Or you would just like to learn more about the practical applications for this fast growing technology.