FPRA Orlando: The Wonderful World of Wikis
A wiki is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration.
I’m sitting in a session featuring Matt Thompson, a professor at the University of Central Florida.
His topic is wikis. He kicked things off by talking about the benefits and pitfalls of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a Web-based free content encyclopedia project. The name Wikipedia is a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website. Little known fact: Wikipedia's main servers are located right here Florida – Tampa to be exact.
He talked about the recent rise in wiki vandalism – any addition, deletion, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia. The most common type of vandalism is the replacement of existing text with obscenities, page blanking, or the insertion of bad jokes or other nonsense. Fortunately, this kind of vandalism is usually easy to spot and is quickly deleted or changed.
Several ways that wikis can be used in your business: time management, accountability, email overload management and task management.
Using Wikis for Team Projects and Work Flow
Matt offered two examples:
Basecamp - a project-management tool. Basecamp features:
> To-do lists
> Writeboards (essentially smaller-scale wikis)
> Milestone management
> Messaging system
> File sharing
> Real-time chat
> Time tracking
Matt set up a Basecamp demo just for FPRA members. You can access it at
http://fpra.seework.com
Login: mthompson
Password: ryan34
Google recently launched a free web word processor which lets you share and collaborate your work online. Visit www.writely.com
Pros and Pitfalls of Wikis
Pros:
> Hold all documents in one place
> Are accessible 24 hours a day from anywhere
> Track what people are doing
Pitfalls:
> Forget to have face-to-face meetings with those you are sharing information with
> People have different processes or ways of working
> Relying on logins to gauge production might not be accurate
> Relying on one person to be the “point man”
Other resources:
Digg.com - Digg is a news website with an emphasis on technology and science articles.
Technorati.com - Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs.
Overall, a good overview of wikis.
