The Wiki, which started off as a breakthrough, easily editable community based online publishing platform, has found its way into just about every robust business collaboration and social media enabled collaborative software platform that has hit the market. It’s edging its way into event organization software, e-learning software platforms, publishing and online media software, social networks, community software, project management and enterprise software too. It’s simple to use, simple to implement and I think above all, it’s versatility to a vast number of uses is its biggest strength.

Take a look at the BarCamp.org Wiki where the BarCamp phenomenon first started and spread its wings to cover all continents and scores of cities all over the world. Although it’s known as an ad-hoc, un-conference, painting a picture of an unorganized chaotic event which takes very little planning, that is far from the truth. Even for the most well seasoned event organizers who undertake U2 concerts to the US Open Tennis Tournament will tell you planning and coordinating multiple bar-camps across all these cities could be a nightmare even if their professional event organization team were to meet up in a single room to discuss and plan venues, sponsorships, refreshments, schedules, logistics and more. Yet, all this gets done by several hundred volunteers spread across the globe on a Wiki.  Now that is collaboration!

When it comes to e-learning, you can picture using a Wiki within an organization or a business to layout shared documentation that can be shared and updated on the fly to build a resource of learning information at a central location accessible to all within a business. If Wikipedia is any indication of just how big a learning and information resource can be put together by an online community, even the largest business should be able to use Wikis as a learning platform and still seem like a small initiative in comparison to Wikipedia.

So if trans-continental events can be successfully planned and executed while massive online encyclopedia of information can be successfully built by collaboration of individuals not affiliated to any one organization, the use of Wiki’s for internal business collaboration is yet to be utilized to its full potential. We integrated Wiki’s as a core feature of our Communifire social networking software platform for business collaboration primarily because of its versatility. Combined with a closed group social networking features, it becomes even more suited for businesses who wish to use it for learning, publishing, planning projects, carrying out discussions, keeping groups updated, communication and collaborating on projects.

If you’re given a blank page and a pencil, it’s completely up to your imagination what you do with it. A Wiki, from the social media and business collaboration perspective, is like that blank page. How you wish to set it up and use it to collaborate on something is entirely up to you. The options are virtually unlimited and so is the potential of this platform.

Something tells me we have yet to see the biggest collaborative effort enabled by the Wiki.

Only time will tell.

How are you using Wikis in your organization?