Wiki and How Can it Be Useful

¶ … wiki and how can it be useful for an organization? A wiki is a website where users can add to, modify, or delete the contents of that page via web-browser using a richtext editor or a simple markup language. (Mitchell, Scott (July, 2008) ). Most wikis are created collaboratively. They are powered by wiki software. Wikis are useful for organizations since they serve many purposes from knowledge management to note-taking. They can be community websites and intranets. Wikis can actually be useful for organizations in numerous ways.

Here are various different ways in which they can help an organization: Wikis can help the organization with their to-do list using programs such as GTD Tiddlywiki, dcubed, or MonkeyGTD.

Similarly, Wikis, being easily modifiable, help the organizations plan and complete their project from beginning to end by adding notes, making a time-line, pasting in graphics, and so forth The company's operation manual can be put online as a wiki and updated as changes occur A checklist can be put on one's wiki Invoices can be tracked The flexibility of a wiki can be great for logging work done with clients.

Contacts can be added on a wiki A wiki can be excellent for someone who needs one central place for hosting all his work (such s notes, images, articles and reports). The wiki is superb for collaboration where dispersed individuals can work on one project from the one central spot of the wiki The wiki, in short, is superb for organizations since it allows for collaboration and keeps everything organized and in one spot whilst begin versatile. (Gigaom.

) • Select ONE of the products that allows you to create a wiki and describe it in detail. Media wiki is the WikiEngine that is used by the WikiPedia project, the SourceWatch project, WikiQuote, WikiBooks, WikiTravel, UncycloPedia, and others, including all wikis on WikiCities. It hosts the most public wiki pages. It is written in PHP, and its wiki syntax is mostly based on UseModWiki. It uses MySql as a database management system. SemanticMediaWiki is an extension of MediaWiki which enables SemanticWeb features such as annotations using the ResourceDescriptionFramework.

The downside of media wiki is that its code base is poor althoguh improving. Its functionality is becoming easier with usage, and it has become far more friendlier to small wiki administrators than it used to be. • Identify ONE organizational goal that would be supported by this wiki.

The organizational goal would be providing a detailed wiki of the history, goals, details of employees, meetings, projects, objectives, organizational handbooks, questions related to the organization -- in short, a synopsis of all the aspects of the organization would be featured on one place so that aspects of the organization can be added to, modified, or deleted as changed occur and this can be done in a collaborative fashion.

Since media wiki works according to WikiNamespaces, it is ideal for modifying and placing in additional categories or deleting categories such as we find in Wikipedia. An organization, therefore, that hosts a catalog of its company's description (such s history, offerings, objectives etc.) or is planning a complex project might welcome such a wiki engine where WikiNamespaces. Can be deleted, modified, and added at will. The whole is supported by a so-called DocumentMode/ThreadMode segregation where categories are placed as separate namespaces on MediaWiki.

So for instance, there is a "User:" namespace for HomePages, a "Category:" namespace for categories, a "Template:" namespace for content, a "Special:" namespace for script-generated content and a "Help:" namespace for information for new users. You may also insert your own namespace. "Wikipedia" for instance chose that as their own for their own specific them, e and discussions.

(Media Wiki ) • What features would you offer in the wiki to support that organizational goal? I would offer an FAQ (frequently asked questions ) feature where small teams of people who need to provide answers to and update information to others can include this in a wiki. It can be used to answer common questions that crop up and thereby serve as replacement to a company's operation manual or to prevent customers, employees, other people form deluging the organization with their questions.

In this way, common challenges such as what to do when the database is unavailable, mail isn't being delivered, or documents aren't printing can all be printed on the site and updated or eliminated as necessary. An up-to-date employee handbook can also be structured via a wiki, distributing information, for instance about information about health and 401(k) plans or a bout general office events. Similarly, I could also structure the wiki so that it plans and organizes meetings as they occur as well as inserting employee's feedback of meetings.

Brainstorming too can take place via this page. These are just some of the ways in which the wiki can be used to centralize the information of the organization and collaboratively add to, modify or delete it as changes occur.(About.com) • How this is related to the learning objectives.