nuance intelligence

Wikipedia turned 10 this year. It’s fabulously useful.  Wikipedia has upwards of 3.8 million articles, and that’s just the English version – if you don’t dig/read English, you can check out one of the 269 other languages in which Wikipedia is available. Wikipedia has also provided a shining example of how awesome crowdsourcing really is…and how much a dedicated bunch of volunteers can do. Wikipedia remains a non-profit, supported largely by the contributions of users (and some prescient foundations and companies.)

So, what lessons can a for-profit enterprise learn from Wikipedia’s success? How can we make wikis work for us?

Imagine giving your organization a multi-directional communications platform that is the ultimate resource on any topic related to your business that your people think is relevant enough to share and discuss. Now imagine that all the good stuff that everyone in your organization knows (or made or drew or wrote or videotaped) is all right there, ready to be used by other team members, and vendors and customers, depending on the goals of your wiki and who has access.

Wikis are an amazing knowledge-sharing tool that enable organizations to benefit from anyone who cares enough – or is ambitious enough – to contribute. Wikis should be set up to allow anyone inside the company to contribute. That way, they tap the intellectual capital available at all levels of the organization.

A well-trafficked wiki offers peerless research opportunities for the organization’s leaders. If you want to know what is interesting to your employees, look at what is going into the wiki. And wikis are one way to establish two-way communications within an organization, on a broader scale than email could ever accomplish.

Wikis have a few downsides, too – which I’ll cover in Part II.

It take a village to raise a wiki....