RSS feedsIf I've learned anything during my six years at IT Week, it's to have an open mind. Things change, and change more dramatically than I might once have expected. Nine months ago Oracle's takeover of PeopleSoft looked like an impossible, quixotic pursuit, for example. Today it looks inevitable.
Similarly, half a decade ago, the emerging phenomenon of instant messaging (IM) looked like an irrelevance. How could a toy conceived to support consumer small-talk have any impact on business? I recall arguing exactly that myself.
Today, quite a few firms with dispersed teams depend on IM. Far from having no business impact, IM can actually provide the glue needed to bind a remote, mobile, teleworking, hot-desking rabble into a cohesive, focused team.
With this background in mind, I've been looking at the growing population of wiki-based web sites, of which the Wikipedia web encyclopaedia is probably the best known.
Wikis are web sites where visitors are handed editing rights - the idea being to foster a vibrant pool of shared data. Any visitor can suggest or contribute information. Any visitor can make changes to the content. Nobody moderates and nobody edits. Or rather, everybody edits and everybody moderates. Standards for what should and shouldn't be included emerge through consensus, within whatever boundaries are set by the host of the wiki.
In other words, wiki sites sound vague, woolly, even dangerous.
But as the useful Wikipedia demonstrates, the wiki concept can work very well. Global editing can lead to communal polishing.
And unlike email, scale works to counter spam, rather than to encourage it. The chances are that someone else will see a spam entry before you do, and delete it.
Newly-introduced errors also tend to be spotted and fixed rapidly. Researchers at IBM, for example, report that most Wikipedia pages dealing with controversial topics have been vandalised at some point. "But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly," they add.
In many ways, wiki resembles the open source software model applied to data rather than code. And so it suffers from similar flaws. Only certain wikis will reach the tipping point where they gain a self-sustaining life of their own. And at a detail level, only certain wiki topics will amass enough interest to become useful.
In September Ethan Zuckerman, founder of the GeekCorps charitable organisation that works to bring IT to the Third World, noted that (at that time) the Wikipedia had almost no information about the Congo civil war. This very real conflict has caused over three million deaths. By contrast users could find a wealth of detail about fictional wars in Middle Earth.
Given all of the above, it's tempting to say that wikis have no relevance for business. But I fully expect that view to be invalidated.
User-editable information spaces will almost certainly find a place in business, and forward-thinking IT managers should begin planning for their arrival.
The very brave might even broach the subject with information owners such as marketing, PR and sales, and suggest setting up a wiki as a means to pool useful business information.
