Wiki implementation and benefits for organizational knowledge management

¶ … Wikis Within an Organization

If technically create wiki, explore read multiple existing wiki sites a substitute exercise.) This reading give ideas wikis organizations: Grace, P.L. (2009).

What is a wiki and how can it be useful for an organization?

A wiki is basically a webpage that anyone can be able to view and edit its content as long as one has an active internet connection, wikis are easy to edit, and since this is done from the browser one does not need to learn any HTML. Wikis allow for groups collaborations and asynchronous communication across the internet Flierl & Fowler, 2007.

With open access there exists potential for mischief from some users, monitoring of the wiki is a must, and this might be very time consuming and resource intensive, it is for this reason that only authorized users are allowed to add or modify content in the majority of the wikis.

Wikis is useful in an organization as it allows for easy document sharing unlike emails which may be lost and wikis also have a nice audit trail so anyone can track a documents edit history. A wiki can capture a lot of information that an organization might need, anyone can be able to edit to the content as long as one has a browser and internet connection, they also require less manpower to maintain it. A wiki has capabilities for growth and expansion, and this would work well especially with the growth of an organization Hu et al., 2008.

The in-built search facility of wikis will make document searching an easy task.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is open-source wiki software that is developed by the Wikimedia Foundation and is used by the foundations projects like Wikipedia, Wikinews and Wikitionary, and it is also used to power other organization's wiki pages. MediaWiki is written in PHP and makes use of a database to store all its data. MediaWiki was first deployed in 2002 to power the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, since then it has been deployed by other companies either internally or publicly, and it is mainly used for Knowledge Management Flierl & Fowler, 2007.

MediaWiki allows for easy document collaboration and has the capability to handle a company's growth due to the fact that all data is stored in a database.

MediaWiki content is edited by clicking on the edit button found on the page or by going to the particular section and clicking on it from there, this sub-grouping of sections makes editing of longer pages easy. It also has support for different languages Knobel & Lankshear, 2009.

MediaWiki allows users to include rich content in their Wikis, this is not only limited to pictures and videos, but one can also have mathematical formulas, musical scores and Egyptian hieroglyphs. MediaWiki has a feature for tracking all the recent changes that are made on an article, this allows for audit trail and also for a roll back in case there is an issue with the edit that was made.

Features to be offered in the Wiki

The wiki would need to have these features for it to support the organizations goals document creation all employees would have access to this feature, document editing, document approval by specific users not everyone this would be mostly done by the managers or their assistants, reviewing of documents before any document can be published on the wiki it would need to be checked for its relevance and accuracy, uploading of images this would be a standard feature that is available to anyone who has access and is authorized, and overall admin who would be in charge of ensuring all documents meet the organizations standards Weingarten & Frost, 2011()

How web 2.0 technologies can help information sharing within organizations

Web 2.0 technologies are all about an organization using the internet and internet technologies creatively, fostering innovation, simplicity and speed by using this platform. With web 2.0, there are many capabilities for document sharing and collaboration between the various departments within an organization. This collaboration and sharing allows for information to be accessed easily within the organization thus promoting cohesion between the various departments Weingarten & Frost, 2011()

A wiki is a web 2.0 technology, and if properly used it can help streamline an organizations documents and collaborative activities. Instead of each department having its own tools and techniques for information collection and sharing, the organization needs to set up one wiki website and have all the organizations department using it so that there can be one repository for information, this would encourage collaboration within the organization.