Wikis Still Have a Perception Problem

In a recent piece from BtoB Online, author Richard Karpinski examines the impact various media are having on the enterprise. A few quotes from the article...

"Video is really mature from an audience perspective, especially webcasts," said Stacy Malone, VP-interactive media director at Universal McCann. "Beyond that, there's a huge opportunity in video content hosted on b-to-b content sites. But it's been a challenge to get publishers to move in that direction. It's a huge opportunity for publishers to embrace."

Less clear in their impact are wikis (interactive Web pages where users can contribute as well as consume content) and social networks (sites that enable networking and communications among groups of users).

Predictable, I suppose, but I have a theory about the wiki adoption (one I’ve stated many times before). The audience is not perceiving wikis as a ‘collaborative’ medium. Just like the perception that has been ingrained by wikipedia, people view it as a place to get information. Some percentage of the population (2% is my estimate) has a need to ‘vocalize’, therefore they tend to be the content (or information) providers.

Wikis can be more than information repositories. They can be the actual place where groups of people collaborate, communicate, and actually accomplish whatever teams of people need to do. This is a far more productive approach to working in groups than relying on email.

Until companies start promoting and using wikis in that manner, it will remain a fringe technology and companies will miss out on the best productivity tool since email (ironically)..

Comments

[Jon Silvers]

I just don't get the comparison of videos and wikis. They serve different purposes for marketers; the former is passive, used for pushing information out, and the other is collaborative, used for building community knowledge.

[Kris]

Well, Jon, you know how it goes. Your editor wants a piece written, assigns it to someone, and - voila - another puff piece.

I'm less concerned about comparing apples and oranges than I am about the continuous characterization of wikis as being content/information repositories. I really wish we could across the message of wikis being a powerful alternative to email when it comes to groups or teams of people communicating and collaborating in the context of getting things done.

[Sam Rose]

One of my routes of success in getting people to adopt wikis:

Work with the email addicts. The ones who are constantly copying you on dozens of different massive threaded email conversations. The people who try to get all of their work done through email.

Get them to post this stuff to a wiki, and get everyone the are copying emails on to subscribe to an RSS feed from that wiki. If more people would collaborate via wiki rather than email, they would get more done, and likely would produce a higher quality.

Another idea is http://www.communitywiki.org/en/MailingListThenWiki, where you bring people into a mailing list, then slowly try to transition them over to a wiki.

[kris]

Amen, Sam. I am familiar with the folks at Communitywiki, in fact, Lion Kimbro chastised me for a comment I once made about public wikis but we are all on the same 'page'. Thanks for the support and the link (although the MailingListThenWiki page appears to be blank - is there a plan to add something to it?)

[Sam Rose]

Sorry, that was because I put a comma on the end of the URL. This should get you there:

http://www.communitywiki.org/en/MailingListThenWiki

[Megan]

I agree with Kris. Copying, sending and resending long email threads is unproductive. You get lost it it. Wiki has a truly huge potential for eliminating this kind of thing. That's why I believe that tools that utilize this potential have bright future infront of them. For example, there's a project management application, called, Wrike.com It works like a wiki + it has timetracking, planing and other features.