What is a team wiki?
April 16, 2009
I contrast the team wiki with Wikipedia.
What is a team wiki?
When people think of wikis, they think of Wikipedia. There has been a tremendous amount of research on Wikipedia and its user base, and sometimes Wikipedia is used as a proxy for wikis in general. But Wikipedia exemplifies just one of many types of wiki usage, and a highly specific and rather unique one at that. Therefore, I want to contrast team wikis with Wikipedia to show that they represent a different context than does Wikipedia, and thus are open to and enable different kinds of research and work.
Team wikis (also referred to in the literature as “corporate wikis” or “enterprise wikis”) are another type. These are wikis used within the context of an organization for collaboration and coordination. Where Wikipedia’s pages are highly stereotyped (being one of only a few types — encyclopedia entries, pages describing wikipedia policies, user pages or help pages), team wikis are used for many varied purposes, among them project management, workflow management, issue tracking, ad-hoc collaboration, knowledge management, tech support, e-learning, and communities of practice [Majchrzak et. al. 2006, p. 100]. Where Wikipedia has tens or hundreds of thousands of contributors and millions of readers all of whom have little or no personal connection, team wikis user bases are far smaller — on the order of ten contributors and tens of readers [Majchrzak et. al. 2006, p. 101] — and are all known to one another outside the context of the wiki. Team wikis are also smaller, containing hundreds to a few thousand pages rather than the several million pages that Wikipedia now contains. Finally, where the purpose of Wikipedia is to be a knowledge reference that converges to provide more accuracy and coverage as more people contribute, team wikis are evolving artifacts-in-use which continuously adapt to support changing team practices and goals and thus never converge to a completed state.
References
- A. Majchrzak, C. Wagner, and D. Yates, “Corporate wiki users: results of a survey,” in WikiSym’06: Proceedings of the international symposium on Symposium on Wikis, 2006, pp. 99-104.
