Quick, Free, and Ready-to-Use: The Wiki Concept

High license fees, typically combined with even higher costs for configuration, training, and workflow restructuring, make management systems difficult to work with, expensive, and inefficient. Moreover, due to the largely unstructured nature of available content, extensive testing is needed, often reducing company productivity over years or even stopping productive work altogether.

With these factors in mind, it’s time to look for alternatives, and there is one – called wikis. Whereas the structure of content in “real” management environments (file system or database-supported system) must be defined in advance, a wiki organically adapts itself to meet content requirements. There is no long-term planning – you can start developing creative knowledge bases right away.

What is a wiki?

The term wiki is based on the Hawaiian word, meaning “quick”. This sums up the essence of wikis, which are designed for quick knowledge transfer. Any authorized user can read, search, edit, and link the contents of a wiki. The main management functions are available for free. The wiki concept was invented by Ward Cunningham and first used in 1994 to implement an easy channel of communication between developers. Today, there are many types of wikis used for different purposes.

Technically speaking, a wiki is a type of server software that allows users to edit, search for, and view contents in a basic Web browser.

What do Wikis offer?

The features described in the following sections belong to the standard scope of most wiki projects. Because the source code is open, any number of functions can be additionally programmed.

Knowledge Pools
The key features of wikis are that users can edit content directly on a wiki page and easily link pages.

Internal linking using WikiWords:
When users edit the content of a page, they can use WikiWords in the text. This has the following effect:

If a particular WikiWord has not been used in this wiki before, a link to a new page with the WikiWord as the page name is created on the edited page The user can then click the link and, in this way, create a new page and define the content.
If the WikiWord has been used in this wiki before and a page with this name exists, a link to the page is created on the edited page. This is the easiest way to link content.

External linking
You can create links to other Web sites or files, such as spread-sheet files, by providing the corresponding destination address, like HTML links.

WikiWiki Markup Language for Formatting
The tags used by the WikiWiki markup language are very simple and are rendered into a HTML-based page by the server when a page is sent to a Web browser.
Although the WikiWiki markup language is not standardized, all wikis have common tags for lists, headings, and the markup of WikiWords, without which the linking of wiki pages would not be possible.
These basic formats can be used to create and edit simple layout, quickly and easily.

Embedding images
Images can be referenced on wiki pages by adding their storage location. When a page is opened that contains a referenced image, the image is loaded from its storage location and displayed. Other multimedia content, such as videos, can be embedded in the same way.

Hierarchically structured pages
Wiki pages can be hierarchically structured, and this hierarchy can be displayed to provide navigational assistance.

Management functions
A wiki provides useful free management functions, whereby “free” not only means no license costs, but also no configuration costs.

User authorization
You can control who views a Wiki. Read and write permissions can be defined for different content. Alphabetical lists, topic catalogs or pages with personal portals can be created.

Version management
Different versions of wiki pages are available. Each version shows the author who last edited the version and a “diff”, which compares the changes between a revision and its previous version.

Checking links
The Backlink function is important for checking the wiki structure. This feature generates a list of all wiki pages that link to a specific wiki page.

Export features
You can export the content of a wiki to make it available for use in other environments.

Wiki for Documentation

Due to the obvious advantages of wikis – easy exchange of information and free management features – Comet® immediately identified the potential benefits of using wikis for documentation purposes and has successfully put this into practice in the form of glossaries, portals for development input, and style guides for documentation teams.

Wikis in their present form are perhaps not the solution for all documentation requirements. However, the range of existing wiki projects show that wikis have many possible uses and, in the future, that wikis may well provide the best solution, if not the only solution for other areas of documentation.

For more information about wikis, visit www.wiki.org.