Wiki Part I: Progressive Communications, Wiki Style

This article explores how the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and other organisations have been using wikis as an online collaboration tool. It provides some ideas of when wikis may and may not be useful. The article explains that a wiki is an online database-driven website for simple, quick and versatile online publishing. It is designed to be easy to use and extremely flexible in terms of structuring content - without needing strong administrative or web design skills. It allows multiple users to edit text and contribute information.

The article discusses how wikis can be used for collaborating on such things as a newsletter and to support meetings. It has been developed to be simple enough to teach any workshop participant to use in half an hour, and also enables more than one person to express themselves. Once events are over, wikis can be used as starting points to further develop different threads and topics that came out of discussions. Everybody can publish any type of content in a form and space he/she wants. An active community can therefore develop knowledge together.

Another use of wikis is for collective project proposal development. A geographically dispersed group of people can develop texts directly “on the page”, or upload document files to a wiki repository. The repository then contains downloadable file attachments, with exact upload times recorded, authors’ notes on every version and the like. Both techniques are usually combined. The “formal” document is often being developed and uploaded as a downloadable text file, while particular half-developed sections and lists of resources are being developed on web-based pages. This approach requires someone to then integrate these separately developed sections into the master document.

Wikis are useful when working on a single document or a relatively self-contained topic, section or page. They might also be useful in the idea stage of jotting down and adding information. Wikis may not be ideal if there is a need to see who has made what changes where, or to comment directly on text. Each page shows who saved the last changes, but you cannot track who wrote which parts of the text. In the final stages of a project proposal, wikis might also be less effective. This is basically due to wikis’ inappropriateness for creating heavily formatted documents.