Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran this very interesting article entitled “‘Wiki’ May Alter How Employees Work Together.” According to the article, a wiki (the Hawaiian word for “quick”) is a type of Website “that many people can revise, update and append with new information.” The article describes wikis as a “giant bulletin board on an office wall to which employees can pin photos, articles, comments and other things.” Sounds sort of like a collaborative blog, doesn’t it? In fact the article mentions blogs as follows:
Getting average people to think about controlling the Web as comfortably as they might an e-mail or a Word document has not been easy. But the rise in popularity of Web logs known as blogs and other “social software” is changing that. Blogging, say wiki proponents, has revived the idea that a Web site can be an ever-changing organism that can be linked with other Web sites to create a larger and more informative picture. But if the blog is a soloist, a wiki is an orchestra. . .
The article goes on to discuss the enormous potential that the wiki has for the business workplace:
Now, venture capitalists are funding several startups that are attempting to take the idea to a bigger and more lucrative general-business audience. Their goal is to try to solve one of the workplace’s most vexing problems: how to have employees collaborate and communicate better electronically.
Perhaps wiki skills will soon be featured in the 21st century employee’s resume. (That thought reminds me of this comic here from the TaxGuru.) And wouldn’t wikis be a wonderful tool for law firms? Firms could have their own internal wikis on various legal topics so that knowledge could be cataloged and utilized by others in the firm and added to as statutes, regulations and case law change.
By the way, Dave Baker at Benefitslink has started a wiki here which readers can use. I believe if you go here, you can view what readers have posted so far, including this great tool–Free Sites For Keeping Current.
(Apparently, a “bliki” is a cross between a blog and a wiki. Read about it here.)