Practical Wiki Applications

In RunningYourOwnWikiFaq, someone asked, "I can't help feeling that the concept of wiki is incredible but I'm struggling to translate it into practical applications. Can you give me some examples of when and how this would come into its own?" They received several answers:

• Building FAQs from mailing lists (many contributors, no organized structure).

  • Talk.Origins, an Evolution/Creation newsgroup have just started using http://wiki.cotch.net/ to build up an encyclopedia of responses to common questions and misunderstandings on the group.

• Maintaining a coherent view of a project (small to mid-scale) with minimal overhead among a team of co-workers, so that new members in the project can get started quickly and by themselves.

  • This model is being used by more and more OpenSource projects. Examples: http://freedesktop.org, http://psas.pdx.edu, http://www.python.org/moin/ . Often, the wiki is only writable by those registered with the project, but readable by the general public.

• Supporting the execution of a task by enabling people to give their input, relate it to other contributions, and to ease merging/aggregating the information.

  • Here at http://www.IDEALX.com/, we use wiki as a component of our project management software suite, from the first contact with the client to starting the redaction of the docs. (Dominique dot Quatravaux at IDEALX dot com)
  • For further discussion of this WikiInTheWorkplace application, see ProjectWiki and TeamWiki.

• I run a wiki (WikiLiver) which I use for teaching of medical students and physicians: I use it during the presentation, students can use it to review instead of lecture notes and I can give students projects to work on to make it a more comprehensive Web which can be used as alternative to a medical textbook. (mathis AT heydtmann DOT de)

• For an intranet in a small company. Everyone can contribute what they know best.

• The WikiPedia project uses wiki software to build a free encyclopedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/

• BillTrost wrote a wiki to maintain his Web browser bookmarks, instead of trying to keep bookmark lists on multiple browsers consistent.

• Ever wanted more than one person to work on a text (or Word) document at the same time? But that was never possible. A wiki lets you have several people working together on any document - you can convert it to Word later if you want. The book ExtremeProgrammingApplied: PlayingToWin was written this way. In VlissidesOnBeck, KentBeck recounts how the authors used a private wiki to write a 120-page manuscript in three days.

• AndreasSchweikardt uses a wiki for a private collection of links, ideas, hints, code snippets and so on. I invited friends and colleagues to maintain this as a resource for doing a good work.

• http://fictionwiki.blogan.com/ is attempting to collaboratively tell stories using a wiki. This is a difficult task, though. This site is under construction as of Sept. 16. 2004.

• BookShelved is a wiki for book reviews. This allows even a casual reader to submit information on an obscure book.

• In Madison, Wisconsin, http://madpeace.org/Wiki/FrontPage is organizing a political protest movement.

• Use a wiki for discussion between players for Web/e-mail based games such as Nomic (see NomicGame).

• I've just set up a wiki on our department's intranet as an alternative to the forum we used to have. Its aim is to be a store of knowledge and can also be used to note things like when people are going to be away.

• I just set up a wiki here: http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/ with the aims of becoming a major resource for people on the autistic spectrum

• Look how beneficial it has been used for the purpose of answering the question you asked! Anyone can come and add their comments. The ultimate shareable knowledge rich application.

• Quick drafting of StateMachines. Pages represent states, links represent transitions.

• Our AutomatedConfigurationManagementEnvironment outputs .WIK files(i.e., EddiesWiki pages) for each project in the workspace.

• I am a foreign language teacher and am using a wiki to allow students to collaboratively create a bank of information they have found through web research. They investigate various cultural and other topics, and put their findings on the wiki. They then must peer-edit each others' work. The pedagogical point is to allow their work to enlighten others, to collaborate, to be held accountable for their assignments, to make the language and culture more accessible and concrete, to give them a place to communicate in a new language with relatively low stakes in terms of anxiety, and to integrate our classroom topics in a big, fat co-created space. Plus it's fun.

• I'm setting a wiki up at http://www.wrongplanet.net/ for people with AspergersSyndrome

CategoryWiki