Wiki, a Shared Blog for Distributed Teams, and for Everybody

Writable webs empower people to share knowledge effectively and to be more productive

Wiki, a Blog (Weblog) for groups: Communities can organize and share content in an organic and free manner
Extended with the right set of functionality, a Wiki can be applied to distributed teams to schedule, manage, document, and support their daily activities
The web as a whiteboard for everybody.

Conference talk at VCWI 2005 IT Seminar in Eindhoven, Sept 2005BR Jun Hu BR MailTo(j.hu@tue.nl)BR Slides available from [http://id00243.id.tue.nl/JunHu/WikiYourWeb]

What is Knowledge?

Knowledge
- The fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association;
- The body of truth, information, and principles acquired by mankind
Knowledge management:
- Control over content (conventional CMS)
- Processes for the creation, dissemination, testing and utilization of knowledge
- Knowledge_management

How can Knowledge be Fostered?

Can knowledge be managed? Von Krogh, Nonaka and Ichijo in Enabling Knowledge Creation, 0195126165, believe that knowledge can only be enabled
- Management in the sense that you cannot force someone to innovate. We can only create an environment where knowledge can be created
Five key Knowledge enablers
1. Instill a knowledge vision
2. Manage conversations
3. Mobilize knowledge activists
4. Create the right context for knowledge creation
5. Globalize local knowledge
How can this be achieved? With processes and tools

Ways to create and share knowledge

Challenges of Static Intranets

Some content is outdated
When was the page last updated?
Incomplete content
Difficult to find content
Inconsistency across departments
Special tools, knowledge and permission required to maintain
Content is static, it has a webmaster syndrome
- If someone discovers a page with incorrect or insufficient information, (s)he will often ignore it because it takes too much time to find out who the webmaster is and to write an e-mail requesting an update

Challenges of Distributed Teams

Open questions:
- How to get virtual teams working together efficiently?
- How to get everyone in sync?
- How to avoid duplication of efforts?
Typical answers:
- E-mail
- Scheduled conference calls
- Occasional visits
- Shared network disks
- Instant Messaging (IRC, AIM, ICQ, etc)

Challenges of Distributed Teams

E-mail and mailing lists are great, but:
- Post and reply vs. post and refine
- Great for discussion, but ... hard to find "final consensus" on a thread
- E-mail is not hyper-linked and is not structured, content can't be grouped easily into related topics
- E-mail and attachments are not version controlled and it is difficult to determine the history of a document

Challenges of CMS

Rigid structure (can be good and bad)
Control over content more important over free form knowledge sharing
Content is typically structured hierarchically or in table format, with limited cross-linking between pages
Limited support for unstructured content, or content that has "structure and exceptions"

User Generated Content

Forums: Get lots of momentum and conversation happening, but things tend to vanish into the archives and get lost. Topics can also get off-track quickly
Blogs: More directed than forums, but less flexible.
Wikis: Most flexible, great ability to cross-link information. Potential to be ruined by vandalism / revert wars. Less structured format doesn't lend itself to debate / discussion / conversation as well, but can result in a more coherent final position.

Blogs vs. Wikis

Blog: (Weblog)
1. Key: Easy to publish opinions of individual in regular intervals
2. Media to express individual voice
3. "Post media" (like e-mail), sometimes with feedback and talkback
4. Usually hosted service (e.g. Six Apart's [http://www.typepad.com/ TypePad])
Wiki: (WikiWikiWeb)
1. Key: Easy to create and refactor on content owned by group
2. Media to express group voice, deemphasizing identity of individuals
3. "Refactor media", content may change at any time
4. Usually open source software, installed on own server
Some Blogs have Wiki-like features, some Wikis have Blog capabilities
- Merge over time?

Email vs. Wiki

attachment:email.png	attachment:wiki.png
email	wiki

What is a Wiki?

WikiWikiWeb = Writable Web
- As quick to contribute as e-mail
- As easy to use as a website
WardCunningham implemented the original WikiWikiWeb in 1995 to collaborate on software patterns
Inspired by HyperCard; some call it a Blog for groups
Wiki design principles:
Open
Should a page be found to be incomplete or poorly organized, any reader can edit it as they see fit
Incremental
Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written yet
Organic
The structure and text content of the site is open to editing and evolution
more
WikiDesignPrinciples

What is a Wiki? (cont.)

The original WikiWikiWeb has these features:
- Read-write web, every page can be edited using just a browser
- HTML form based editing
- Pages are served dynamically
- Pages are linked automagically with camel case words LikeThis or words ["Like This"]
- Simple markup, no need to learn HTML
Try the WikiSandBox
Over 100 Wiki engines based on the original Wiki idea, mostly open source
Wiki has geek appeal
Mainly used by Internet communities and academia

Wiki Tools

Open Source WikiEngines: Download and install
- MoinMoin: Used by internet communities (Python)
- [http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl UseModWiki]: Used by internet communities (Perl)
- [http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/ PhpWiki]: Popular Wiki (PHP)
- [http://www.flexwiki.com/ FlexWiki]: .NET based (C#)
- [http://snipsnap.org/ SnipSnap]: Wiki + Blog (Java)
Hosted Wiki services: Wiki farms
- [http://www.socialtext.com/products/workspace/ Socialtext Workspace]: Open source Wiki (Kwiki) with Blog extensions; for corporate use ($$$)
- [http://www.editme.com/ EditMe]: Simple Wiki and Blog ($4.95/month)
- [http://www.teamflux.com/FrontPage Teamflux]: Simple Wiki ($20/quarter/person)
Wiki appliance: Wiki in a preconfigured box
- [http://www.socialtext.com/products/appliance/ Socialtext Appliance]: Based on Kwiki with some proprietary extensions

What is Wiki good for?

Company Intranet
Community Builder
Educational Collaboration
Personal Web Site or Blog
Small Business Site
Online Notebook
Personal Information Manager

Examples: Wikipedia

attachment:wikipedia.png

Examples: Wikipedia (cont.)

[http://www.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia]: Wiki + Encyclopedia
A free encyclopedia that is being written collaboratively by its readers
Project started in January 2001
The most active public Wiki: There are over 290,000 articles in English; more in 50 other languages
Anyone in the world can edit any page.
Doesn't that lead to chaos?
- Domain experts contribute
- Well defined policies for contributing and handling content
- Graffiti gets removed quickly (rollback available)
  - IBM's [http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/ research] on history flow of articles ([http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/gallery.htm gallery])
Content can be freely distributed and reproduced under the terms of the [http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License, GNU Free Documentation License]

Examples: WordPress Manual

attachment:wordpress.png

Examples: Chinese Python

attachment:chinesepython.png

Examples: FreeDesktop.org

attachment:freedesktop.png

Examples: WikiTravel.org

attachment:wikitravel.png

Examples: Sensei's Library

attachment:sensei.png

Examples: Watermark Diary

attachment:hushui.png

Wiki Basics A

Wikis are collections of pages: attachment:wikipages.png

Wiki Basics B

Every page in a wiki is editable
Just click, type and save! attachment:wikieditable.png

Wiki Basics C

Every page has a name
Linking to a page is as simple as writing its name attachment:wikilinks.png

Controlling changes

Version control attachment:versioncontrol.png

Controlling changes

Version control
diff attachment:diff.png

Controlling changes

Version control
diff
recent changes attachment:recentchanges.png

Plain Text Editing

MoinMoin: attachment:plaintext.png

Pesudo Rich Text Editing

Wikepedia: attachment:pseudorichtext.png

Rich Text Editing

EditMe: attachment:richtext.png

Live Demo

http://id00243.id.tue.nl/vcwi/WikiSandBox

Worries

E-mail Habit - I prefer e-mail
- E-mail doesn't scale - new people, new technology, new customers, new partners...
Shared knowledge vs. 'Owners' - I don't want to edit someone else's page
- Wiki culture: nobody 'owns' pages, and any change can be built upon
- First person to create page is not the owner!
'No control' syndrome - This leads to chaos
- Wikis provide access control.
- Soft security, audit trail, peer review
Wiki syntax - yet another language
- Wiki is just plain text, e.g., just '''do it''', you will do it
- Use the help pages, doesn't take long to learn

Questions and Answers

attachment:qna.gif

References

Some of the content of this talk is from an excellent introduction to TWiki by [wiki:Main/PeterThoeny Peter Thoeny]: [http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiPresentation11Aug2005 Wiki Collaboration and Wiki Applications for the Enterprise]
MoinMoin: see Frontpage. This is the wiki I am using to give this presentation.
WikiBooks:Wiki_Science
More introduction about Wiki see Wiki entry on Wikipedia.