by Angelo Fernando

May-June 2005, v22 i3 p8(2)

Never heard of wiki? If you're choking on e-mail in your rich-media, real-time, time-strapped work environment, it may be just what you're looking for

Why should anyone in their right mind pay attention to an oddly named phenomenon called wiki? As a communicator, you probably have the same feeling as when you first heard about "that h-r-t-p-colonforward- slash-forward-slash thing," extranets or hypertext, or, more recently, Bluetooth or even blogs.

Wiki is not described with the same passion as blogs, but it appears to have inhaled the same oxygen. It's as if the people on the fringes, sick and tired of corporate communication, went ahead and designed a product-slash-platform that was democratic, dynamic and not managed trom the top. Blogging, says PR practitioner Mike Manuel, helped "to psychologically acclimate people to publishing content online, which has in turn really primed the pumps for wikis." Manuel works for Voce Communications, a Palo Alto, California, firm that represents JotSpot, one of the earliest commercial versions of wiki. Coming from someone who writes about such provocative topics as "Is PR necessary?" when he evangelizes the power of blogs and wikis, Manuel's comments cannot be taken lightly. A wiki, he says, is an essential tool in every PR practitioner's toolbox.

So what's a wiki, anyway? Pronounced "wicky," it refers to an editable web site or document stuffed with content that is never permanent and is marked up by hypertext. You don't need to leam HTML to use it. Wiki, incidentally, is the Hawaiian word for "quick."

"Listservs on steroids"

A wiki taps into the "wisdom of the mob" principle and encourages end users to add and edit content so that content is always in a state afflux. Sounds like an open source encyclopedia, you say? That's perhaps the nearest analogy, but it's not even close. A wiki is the ultimate collaborative tool for a group of users, even on a global scale, especially if they want to create and edit content on the fly as a project moves forward--an area where e-mail is extremely unhelpful.

Just ask Constantin Basturea, a Romanian-born communication professional based in Florida who is an authority on using wikis in PR. Basturea has set up at least three wikis for different purposes, including the NewPRWiki. A year ago he set up the wiki for Global PR Blog Week. Wikis are finding their place because e-mail is really an "information graveyard," he says, unsuitable to the task of real teamwork. "Wikis are a very simple, intuitive, flexible, nontechnical, easy way of facilitating collaboration or sharing."

That suggests wikis are more participatory--what Dan Forbush calls "listservs on steroids." But Forbush, the president of Profnet, a professional networking organization, doesn't see wikis as a substitute for e-mail or the web.

"E-mail is powerful for a lot of reasons, but collaboration is not one of them," he says.

E-mail limits people to "silos," while wikis set them free. To demonstrate this, Forbush agreed to conduct our interview by--you guessed it--setting up a wiki, Profnet's wiki, called EditMe, uses a WYSIWYG editor and is extremely versatile. (WYSIWYG, pronounced "whi:-ee-wig," stands for "what you see is what you get" and is an application that allows users to see on their computer screen exactly what will appear on the printed document.)

The value of a wiki site grows as more people start using it. We all know how fast content becomes obsolete. An editor can only do so much. A hundred editors can take information to a whole new level. But how does it all hold together? Some call it anarchy, but they're really talking about the lack of centralization and control, as is evident in intranets that don't allow much collaboration. Hundreds of users take it upon themselves to post content, making it quite unnecessary to have an editor and a publisher. The dividends are terrific. Check out the Wikipedia, the wiki-meets-encyclopedia concept (www.wikipedia.org) maintained by communities, not editors.

Controlled anarchy

The amazing part about maintaining a wiki is that neither you nor your colleagues need special knowledge of software. You can be creating pages and collaborating on your own wiki within minutes. Some commercial applications are extremely user-friendly. JotSpot's uses editing tools similar to those found in Microsoft Word, making collaboration and content creation swift. Updating a page could be as easy as sending an e-mail to that particular page on your wiki!

How? Each page of a wiki is assigned a de facto e-mail address, and the content is automatically posted. In fact, URLs within a wiki are based on natural language, not HTAIL. That way, says Basturea, end users, rather than HTML-fluent webmasters, define how the site works. You can also e-mail people from a wiki page.

"Say you are working on a newsletter or magazine," suggests Elizabeth Albright, chief strategist for AMP Communications in San Francisco. "You could have your authors post to the site and invite others to edit or make changes. All the changes are saved, so this is a good, central place to watch the progress of your project coming together."

These are still early days in wikis. Unlike the glamour of the web that "disrupted" all communications a decade ago, it will take awhile for corporate management to get it, let alone invest in it. Some resistance comes from people who think that an application that lacks structure and ownership spells trouble. A wiki is built for teams, by teams, so they get to organize content and navigation, rather than have it imposed on them. People are used to web sites having built in navigation and structure, says Basturea, and it is these bad characteristics that wikis leave out. Once you set up a wiki, everyone has a seat at the table. Each person gets to set the menu, organize the seating arrangements and polish the cutlery, so to speak.

If you're yearning for a way to collaborate on your next project, give wikis a try. If you can get past the weird name, a wiki might just be the answer.