It’s been several months already, since I started working on a new green tech project. And I want to share my excitement about our most favorite tool, our team wiki. Short and sweet, here are ten reasons why we could not do without our wiki:
- It’s free. Not all wikis are, but we found one that does not cost us a dime. We are planning to upgrade as we expand and need a more robust version.
- It’s easy to set up. All you need is a name, and you can start inviting your teammates to be co-administrators of your wiki.
- It’s easy to use. Don’t listen to all the scary wiki stories. While it’s true that some wikis can be a bit hard to learn – I never warmed up to SocialText for instance – , others, like PB Wiki, are a breeze.
- It’s oh so forgiving. No need to worry about messing up. You can always edit, rename, or delete a page. And if you change your mind, you can revert to earlier versions on your page history.
- It’s a virtual structure. The front page is a good place to list all the main areas of work for your project, with all the relevant pages underneath each area.
- It’s a task organizer. We are using the side bar to keep track of individual tasks. Nothing like seeing one’s name next to projects, to deliver.
- It’s a repository of knowledge. We can each contribute our knowledge as we go, without having to worry about it ever getting lost.
- It’s a search tool. Type any keyword into the wiki search box, and you get a list of all the pages within your wiki with mentions of that keyword. Very, very useful feature.
- It’s a safe box. No danger of Powerpoint presentations, Word documents, images, pdfs, disappearing. They’re all stored in the wiki ‘cloud’.
- It’s a playground. Uniquely fit for the creative needs of startups. You can play alone, writing pages on your own. Or you can edit, or comment on each other’s pages.
And, no I don’t work for PB Wiki or any other wiki company.
I know you don’t work for PBwiki, but thanks for mentioning us anyways!
Wiki rules, definitely. It is impressive how such a simple concept can bring so much to users. Thanks to Ward.
For a company, we are using a wiki as the basis for the management and supervision of the safety and environmental policies, and users love it.
We experimented with a wiki, blog, open source content management, twitter, yammer and forum software. We found Drupal to be more effective than Wikis and great advantages to an internal blog.
In particular, we found Drupal more effective for us than Wiki because of depth of content and the need to generate a document. It needs more set-up, but well worth it.
We use Drupal and a couple of wikis (ProjectForum and Apple’s) in my company. Drupal is fine for blogging and structured content, but there’s nothing like the ease of use of a wiki for spontaneity and for capturing the tacit knowledge in an organization.
We use the wiki for Project Management, Client interaction, archive, library, etc., but our best experience was with our QMS. We wrote about it here: http://www.geometrica.com/7/64
Cheers!
Pancho
I have no idea what a wiki is… should I know… would it be benificial for me to know…
Just wanted to stop by and say hi. Hi! 😉
Pancho, agree with you. Drupal and wikis are two different beasts:
Barriers to setting up wiki: zero
Barriers to setting up Drupal: very high
And as you pointed, purposes are slightly different also. I see huge value of wiki as internal tool, for the collective working out of company projects.
Doug, I beg to differ re: “need to generate a document”. One other great features of the wiki is that you don’t have the pressure of generating a document. Not need to worry about form. The emphasis is on playing, rough content, iterations, which allows for great creativity.
I have found that my mind works very differently when working let’s say in Word, or PowerPoint or Keynote, for instance vs. in the wiki. I start immediately worrying about how it’s going to look with the first set of tools. With the wiki, I look forward to being ‘messy’.
Perfection is the enemy of creativity.
Wendy, others in the dark about wiki, I have found the tutorials on PB Wiki very helpful.
Best way to learn is to have a friend show you. It should only take a few minutes.
I like Foswiki (http://www.foswiki.org) and Confluence (http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/) a lot. Have a look at these, if you plan an enterprise wiki.
[…] berichtet in Ihrem Blog »La Marguerite« über Ihre Erfahrungen mit Wikis im eigenen Start-Up: 10 Reasons to Start Up With a Wiki. Kurz gesagt ist sie begeistert, wie hilfreich das Wiki für ihr Unternehmen […]
Hi Marguerite,
Great article. Since doing my Masters thesis on Wikis in Small to Medium Enterprise, I have found those in larger more structured businesses objecting to some of what SMEs see as benefits, lack of structure being the foremost among them.
The flexibility and creativity along with multi-tasking and loose role descriptions in small business make for a very different corporate culture and the wiki seems to be a good fit for this.
Wendy, if you have three minutes, there is a great video showing how wikis work for beginners. Well worth the watch. http://www.deltaknowledge.net/2008/06/wiki-video-for-total-beginners.html
Stuart French
Melbourne, Australia
Flexibility, creativity, multi-tasking . . . seems like qualities big companies could benefit from as well! Yet, you are right, that’s more the exception than the rule.
Marguerite,
What a helpful post! There are many people out there who don’t understand all the benefits of Wikis (myself included!) and you’ve really explained this well. I’m so glad things are going well for you!
Lynn
[…] https://lamarguerite.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/10-reasons-to-start-up-with-a-wiki/ […]
Hey, Marguerite, Nice post on why to start up with a wiki. Dreamfish has also started with open source mediawiki as the main workspace for its network of entrepreneurs. I particularly am interested in your use of it for task management, as i just started a new dreamfish group on how to use Wiki for Project Management.
On the Drupal versus Wiki question, I have been deep in this question before. The tech choice depends on the network you are serving and what they want to do. Dreamfish built an innovative Drupal-based platform for a network of networks around sustainability design ideas. However, we then decided to switch to mediawiki stitched with other tools, as we realized it better suited our network’s purposes (and have now put our Drupal platform up for sale.)
Congrats, Marguerite, on start up of Terraqualo!
Tiff
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I have had a lot of good luck with my wiki. It’s really helped me organize my ideas and keep things straight– which I had a major issue with before. These are 10 great points, I agree with all of them! Wiki’s for everyone.
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