Corporate (and Research) Intranet Wiki’s

Here’s a recent article in CIO by C.G. Lynch making the argument for integrating wikis into a Corporate intranet. For those who are using or experimenting with wikis, the benefits of wikis are a no-brainer.  The ease with which wikis can be used to support sharing of collaborative information is well documented.  I probably use dozens of public wikis on a regular basis for collecting information from the research projects I follow. It truly is a "bottom up" technology as the CIO article suggests, where the wiki authors are in charge of the platform.  Many public wikis allow any user to add content to the wiki.  The research organization, however, can present some additional challenges, such as restricted access and data security.  In these cases,  user authentication should be required for authoring and accessing a wiki. Setting up single sign-on for intranet web applications is still a challenge, at lease in my hands, and for this routine monitoring and configuration by the IT team is necessary.

There are many excellent open-source wikis that have been developed.  Probably the most well known is MediaWiki, which is the technology that pioneered the creation of wikis and used by Wikipedia.  I was able to install and configure MediaWiki myself, with no problems.  Here is a comparison of wiki software provided by Wikipedia.  The CIO article describes the product Socialtext, a commercial product targeted for the Enterprise.

Much like content management systems,  discussion forums and blogs, I see wikis as an excellent research IT component to support the "documentation" of projects and processes of a typical research organization. By reducing the barriers to timely publication of project-related information, wikis offer a robust platform for capturing research knowledge that can be further mined using intranet search engines.