As a college student, I find that many of my peers have come across the site Wikipedia. It is an online encyclopedia where anyone with internet access can post information about almost any topic. Wikipedia acts on a much larger scale than the run-of-the-mill wiki but today I am going to tell you how you can use a wiki to better your internal relations.
For a quick overview of what wiki’s are, Plain English has put together a short video about their use.
Wikis can be a brilliant business solution when dealing with employees or within your department. Wiki’s can be updated and written on by any member and can be open to the whole company or segmented into much smaller groups. Once you have created a wiki, you can edit it freely and add content that is easily visible to all the other members. They can be used for sending out memos, working with your team on your latest project, or just to keep up to date on what’s going on around the office. In this capacity, wiki’s are a great idea for corporate communicators working within an organization. In her article, “Collaboration“, Jessica Dye includes a section about wiki’s, their use in the workplace, and an idea what we will see for the future of professional wikis.
That being said, I do not think that corporations should use wikis that are open for public use because information could easily get mixed in with misinformation. However, I find that when working with a smaller group of people with similar goals, a wiki can be a very successful and useful tool to add to a company’s social media repertoire.
I am very interested to know what other people think about wiki’s and their use in the corporate world.
I am glad that you chose to do a post involving the use of wikis in the corporate setting because I feel that they are so useful in helping employees to effectively engage in group collaboration. The fact that they are open to anyone who has been granted access is nice because it allows for a group of people that may work in separate office departments, or better yet office buildings across the country from one another, effectively work together on one document without being in the same physical location. I also liked that you mentioned the fact that it is probably not the best idea for a corporation to open its internal wikis to the public due to the possibility of incorrect information being spread.
I think the concept of a wiki is a great idea and I have seen how successful it can be, i.e. Wikipedia. However, from personal experience, using a wiki was not a successful as I thought it would be. I think this happened because all of us using it were not familiar to the technology (still way to reliant on mass emails) and did not have the time to devote to learning how to make it work for our group. I also agree with your point that on a corporate level wikis should not be open to the public, because by nature, wikis are a planning and collaboration tool not a message to be delivered to stakeholders.