Wikis were initially used within enterprise-based technical communities as a collaborative software platform. Once the flexibility of wikis started to be appreciated the uses expanded, and today they are used for things such as project communication, intranets, and documentation. Many companies have totally replaced their static, HTML-based intranets with collaborative wikis. While there are still probably more wiki implementations behind corporate firewalls than on the public Internet, that landscape is also changing, with more and more wikis being made available for public use.
One example of this trend can be seen with the adoption and use of wikis by WebWorks (see Case Study 1: A Wiki-Driven Company).
Outside of corporations, wikis are also gaining wide acceptance and use in the consumer market. Wikipedia has become one of the most visited sites on the Internet, and for many people it has replaced textbooks as their default source of information for just about everything.
Wikis are also replacing web rings (a set of independently created, but linked websites on a similar topic) and other similar groupings of websites by special-interest groups. Instead of people with a shared interest creating their own websites (often duplicating information) and sharing cross links, these groups are now creating a wiki where people can share information in a central, searchable repository.
Wikis are also gaining popularity as individual productivity tools. A personal wiki can be used as a repository of web links or as a notepad to capture ideas and information. Some vendors offer a service that hosts your wiki on their servers. You access your wiki over the web via a login (in fact this book was written using this type of wiki). Other vendors have versions of their wikis that can be downloaded to a local machine or even run off a USB flash drive (a wiki that fits on a USB stick is sometimes referred to as a “wikiscicle,” a term mentioned by Anne Gentle in her blog, Hurdles and Hardships using Wikis for Technical Documentation). Using a wiki as a personal productivity tool has the advantage of being platform, device, and browser-independent, so you can access it and use it from any machine, anywhere.