WikiCities

One of the things I’ve learned over the last two years is that how to spot a wiki effort that isn’t going to have any real transformative effects. This is not to say that these uses aren’t “successful” on a micro-level, as ultimately client/implementing organization may just be looking for a simplified way to get content to the intra or Internet. However, I have learned–from others and through my own experience–that groups that see a wiki as a way to get their content out–i.e. build a website–simply aren’t likely to achieve any change that is remotely transformative.

Hosting Organizational Pages

One of the people who has written about this topic before is Chris Rasmussen, a social software evangelist and trainer/knowledge management professional at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Ultimately, it boils down to an organization wanting to use Web 2.0 primarily as a way to publicize their activities. So one common variety of this is to build an organizational website in a wiki. This can be useful of course, but let’s face it: you aren’t trying to collaborate or engage people, you are using the wiki as a geocities service, and if your organization had a geocities-like service, the word wiki probably wouldn’t be in their vocabulary.

So What’s Wrong With This?

At the micro-level, nothing is wrong with this. Websites fulfill a very real need of making information available and searchable. One group’s wiki-website isn’t going to cause any real issues. However, this is precisely the tragedy of the commons: one violation (or bad example) doesn’t hurt anybody, but when every group and team has their own wiki-webpage, the wiki starts to look a lot like the rest of an organization’s intranet: compartmented sites that are siloed from the rest of the organization, which nobody is going to traffic because people don’t know how to look for it.

I think we all know how useful most people find their corporate intranets.

Missing the Boat

The other problem with the proliferation of organizational wiki-webpages is that it makes it much harder to use the wiki for mass collaboration: people won’t often stray from their own turf, instead inviting users to check out their organizational page. As a result, information remains–for all intents purposes–compartmentalized and unintegrated.

The other half of this effect is that groups end up seeing the wiki in the wrong way: As a a faster horse rather than a car. Yes some of the power of the wiki is that it’s web-based, but the real transformative piece of it is that it simplifies mass collaboration for the purpose of creating an integrated network of knowledge. And when groups decide to reproduce a 90s era websites (and that’s really all you can do with a wiki), what it does is suffocate loosely organized, large scale efforts at knowledge creation in the wiki by obscuring real innovation and collaboration . In my mind, this is a tragic outcome.