Wikis at Work Compared to Wikipedia

Matt Mahoney spends most of his time working with enterprise wiki customers, cultivating adoption and best practices.  In his most recent blog post, he provides a practical look at how enterprise wikis differ from Wikipedia. Wikis evolve in the context of corporate culture and inter-personal communication styles, for good or ill.  The sense of ownership people have over pages is different than the norms that have arisen for Wikipedians.  After discussing work conversations and group memory in wikis, he leaves us with some tips:

5 Simple Tips
* Assign responsibility for workstreams, and as a result, pages
* Use comments to add your thoughts without crowding out the person stewarding the task
* Rely on abundance, use talk pages for lengthy discussion, then re-factor the discussion into a joint page
* Pair live on IM or a screen-share, alternate note-taking
* Have a meeting, take notes, post the output

Comments

[Syven]

A wiki for me is a cultural platform. All wiki's IMHO represent a cultural platform. When a group decided that they need conservapedia as a separate distinct cultural platform from wikipedia, that was a cultural choice. What makes wiki's fascinating for me, is not the cultural edifice but cross-mingling of culture and this cross-mingling fascination is not in the defining but in the refining. Wiki's therefore don't represent old fashioned defining but new fashioned refining. What that means to an enterprise wiki is that the people of that enterprise have a physical instrument in which enterprise cultural platform is refined for a living organization rather defined for a brain-dead one.

This is a good thing because it makes enterprise culture a strategic reality. What the heavenly enterprise wiki thus does is completely opposite to the hell of wall-to-wall teleconference meetings, this endless vacuum of intelligence that gets sucked of its very life giving properties, through residues which end up in rectangular coffins of Powerpoint decks. If I am the executive of a massive enterprise, I would want to see wiki culture grow, for it is the visible evidence of more than the collaborative power of an organization, but also the genius of ingenuity that isn't lost in a home project trying at the end of a workday to recapture a life squeezed of its innovation in the workplace; or a trade conference presentation where ingenuity becomes a career presentation, a unwitting plea of "come and get me", where the walking dead present their decks that look for a fresh new career challenge probably right into another zombie organization.

Wikepedia is a cultural platform for the greater good, conservapedia is a new cultural platform for right wing values and enterprise wiki's are a cultural platform for the client. An enterprise wiki therefore IMHO isn't a playground for clever people, but a workplace for intelligent people who want to create a living breathing organization that shapes its identity that does not lose its light of intelligence through misinterpretations of strategic intent. One only loses that when the leadership cannot hear or see what is emerging in the organization.

If this explorative thinking piece I have written here was a social text wiki, it would inform those working in social text about its relationship to the social text cultural platform. And what is a cultural platform other than three simple question "what are we about?" and "who do we serve?" and for the third question see below.

The fact that what I write off the top of my head goes into a personal database on my computer and that I will review these words in light of my future experiences turns my personal database into an "individual wiki", only a wiki in the sense that if learning is a vehicle to my individual growth, then when I look back at this message, I will hopefully be reading thoughts of my former self. That does not mean that I have a split personality, but that surely between the words I have written yesterday and the words I write tomorrow there must be some evidence of personal growth.

A wiki therefore if reduced to the status of technology is watering down of the cultural platform, but a wiki whose collaborators want to shape a certain cultural platform that includes their own injection of functional expertise, and treat it as a foundation stone rather than as a cultural edifice, therefore must surely result in imbuing life rather than adding concrete building blocks to that platform. And so to my mind that leads to the third question "What are we collectively building or even individually constructing?".

The enterprise wiki has its place in the corporate cultural platform if that culture is as strongly refined as a Starbucks or Wal*mart or a Google. Refined not defined is the key to a wiki for me. Most organizations are defined and they do not grow intelligence but only market share, but those few organizations that are refined do grow enterprise intelligence and in so doing acquire the competitive advantage of market share. "Narrow is the gate" is a good piece of scripture for this viewpoint and organizations like people are going to be few in number in who can cross through it. Thus I postulate in this 30 minutes of thought today (for whatever it is worth to my personal growth) that the wiki is a cultural platform.

M.