Chris Fletcher on pragmatic wiki adoption, adding to Bill Ives take (“Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web“):
[wikis] work best when there is a specific business need – getting teams to collaborate around a specific business issue or building community around a service offering is a great way to get individuals to start to experiment with how the wiki can be used
Straight to the point. He also argues against big bang approaches of wiki deployment, something that I can understand very well, and argue for all the time. In fact one big advantage of wikis is their capacity for emergence, i.e. letting patterns of usage evolve over time, which is not really leveraged when we install wikis in a pre-defined top-down way. Interestingly, betting on emergence does not collide with the demand for “specific business needs”, when these
- only define a starting point for wiki usage
- don’t restrict extensions and cross-theme wiki-linking
- are (constantly) evaluated and adapted