On Tuesday, Bruno and I repeated our workshop “Getting Started with Wikis“. Have we failed in our mission if one of the participants decides that a Wiki is not the solution for his specific problem? Of course not. Wikis are tools, not a magic wand to solve all your problems in one fell swoop. If I had to summarize the core of Wikis in two words, then those words would be “co-authorship” and “interlinking”.
- “Co-authorship” refers to the fact that Wikis are designed to support collaboration and co-writing or co-creation. Anyone can complement and improve the existing content in a Wiki, and thus adds value by ensuring higher accuracy and completeness of the contents.
- “Interlinking” is my word to describe how easily Wiki hypertext links can be established between the different WikiWords or pages in the Wiki, or even towards URLs outside the Wiki. CamelCase and InterWikiLinks are powerful tools for fast and accurate building of links.
If these characteristics are not essential to solve your problem, then a Wiki might help – or not (it could even be counterproductive). If that is what you learned during our workshop, then you did not waste your time!
PS. For a dutch version of this post, see the innologos website…
