The GroupSwim Diving Board

Personally, I’m a big fan of Wikis (when used in the right circumstances). Coming from a consulting background, I like to collaborate on web documents with my teams and customers. It is a great tool that saves significant time and produces high quality results. HOWEVER, wikis are not great for everything. I run into customers every day who have published external Wikis for their customers to distribute information on their company and/or product. This is a big problem for the following reasons:

1. Most wikis require familiarity or training to use them effectively, especially when contributing. They are not for the faint of heart and require effort to learn.
2. Wikis are challenging to search and find information. They typically create silos of information that can confuse or frustrate a customer.
3. Wikis are not good for ill defined or generic collaboration.
4. They take significant effort to monitor. I would love to see an analysis on how much time the Wiki Editors spend managing Wikipedia. I suspect the answer would be stunning. Most companies couldn’t afford the proportional time and effort necessary to keep up with an evolving wiki.

Many of these customers are now dropping their external-facing wikis, or at the very least, augmenting them with other tools to address customer needs.

There are cases where wikis work well. Customers are:

1. Extremely engaged with you and each other
2. Work well together as a team
3. Focus on specific topics

If a situation meets the criteria above, wikis are fantastic.

I think many companies rolled out Wikis for their customers and incorrectly assumed they were ideal because they give the company one place to go to maintain information. As usual, this is right and wrong. For the company, it might appear to be low maintenance. However, this is a fallacy because the maintenance load grows substantially as the Wiki grows.  For the customers, it is not ideal and leads to frustration and antipathy. My advice is to use a Wiki selectively, but don’t make it the central tool to collaborate with your customers.