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Jeff Hobbs is Director of Engineering at ActiveState and works on Workspace and dynamic languages. He blogs occasionally at blogs.activestate.com.

One of the best web tools available to businesses for enabling teamwork and collaboration is the wiki. Few things speak more to staying in the flow of one’s work than just clicking “Edit This Page” where you see something that needs to be written or re-written. Though Wikis have been around since the 90s, their potential for business collaboration has made them more popular in the business world over the past few years.

While a wiki can let project documentation grow organically as a project unfolds, it is like any tool and needs to be used the right way to get the most out of it. If you’re thinking about using a wiki in your team’s toolkit for the first time, keeping a few points in mind will help everyone get up and running without tripping over the changes that the wiki way brings to project documentation.

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A Culture Shift

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Using a wiki isn’t just about learning new software — it’s also about learning a completely new way of approaching common problems. In order to make wikis work for your team, a culture shift may be needed. Explaining how wikis work is important, but equally so is making sure that people know what the wiki is for and that they have permission to write and re-write as needed. There can be a hesitancy to participate without a clear green light to do so in situations where documentation was previously done in a different way (or not at all).

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Seed the Wiki

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Before you set your team loose on the new wiki, prime the content. Seeding the wiki with some starter pages and some headings to suggest a structure for those pages can be a big help to people not used to looking at a fresh blank page and diving right in. Giving your team some hooks to start hanging their thoughts on will not only speed up the population of those starter pages, but will encourage new pages to be created with a consistent structure.

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Capture Feedback

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As the team begins to get comfortable in making the wiki part of their process, you can use the wiki itself as a point of review for how the change is working out. A great way to do this is to add a page specifically designed for capturing feedback and ideas for making the wiki work to fit your project’s needs.

Not only will you be able to capture important feedback in an open and collaborative way, but the use of a review page itself helps build the value of the wiki as a source of shared knowledge. Your wiki will no longer just be used as a place to collect project details, but it will also offer insight into how you and your team works.

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Beware the Wiki-Wary

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Your team is likely transitioning away another tool that has previously been used to organize some or all of the knowledge about a project. So in addition to learning the new wiki software and the cultural shift that comes with it, team members must also unlearn what they already know about how projects are documented and information is organized.

It’s human nature for people to fall back on old habits while trying to form new ones; they’ll need a wiki champion who can diplomatically redirect content into the wiki. Email is most often the channel that the wiki-wary fall back on during this kind of transition, and the most dangerous for locking knowledge into a recipient list. It’s crucial in the adoption phase to insist that errant emails are channeled into the wiki before they can be acted on in order to get long term and effective buy in from team members.

One way to get your team more excited about using the new wiki, is make using it something of a competition. For example, you can implement an online ‘cred’ system which rewards your team for participation, such as the SocialRewarding extension offered by MediaWiki. Offering points for wiki use gives your team an added incentive to use it instead of falling back on old habits.

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Applying Wikis to User Communities

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We’ve been talking about using wikis internally on development projects so far, but there’s also a compelling use for them in the right kinds of user communities. If your customers are comfortable with web-based communication technologies, adding a community wiki, adequately seeded with starter content, can provide a way for them to help each other by filling out documentation with their own insights, tips and tricks that showcase everything your product is honestly capable of. This may enrage or terrify your technical writing team, but don’t sweat it.

There are plenty of examples of user-powered wikis for documentation, but a couple of particularly robust one are the extensive wiki for Blender, a graphics animation and video production program, and the wiki for ReactOS, an open-source operating system based on Windows NT.

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Just the Facts

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Nearly all wikis dispense with advanced page and text formatting, instead embracing a “just the facts” approach to documentation, that can actually be refreshing. Some see that no nonsense style as a deficiency but it can really be a strength. Removing the ability to spend time formatting content removes the feeling that the content needs more than basic formatting. Where people aren’t spending time on formatting they’re likely to spend it on just writing and moving on.

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Choosing the Right Wiki

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When you’re ready to try a wiki for coordinating your project, you’ll want to start with two things: a set of small targets for wiki use, and a choice of wiki that fits the type of team you work in. For those early targets, the Adoption Curve blog offers some great suggestions: meeting minutes, agenda planning and brainstorming are all natural activities for a wiki, and easy for those new to the format to get their feet wet.

There are a huge number of different options to choose from when deciding on wiki software for your project. Each offers a different set of features and advantages. Wikipedia maintains a large list of wiki software, that could help you get acclimated to the wiki landscape. But what might be more helpful, is the Wikimatrix site, which allows you to compare wiki software features side-by-side. Mashable has also published two large round ups of available wiki software in the past year: 30+ Solutions to Start Your Own Wiki and 100+ More Wiki Tools and Resources.

When evaluating whether using a wiki has been right for you, remember that the best tools often don’t deliver their benefits in one giant step, but in the savings made across many small steps from day to day. Wikis are definitely in that category, and while getting team members to embrace a change can be hard, the results will almost certainly speak for themselves when it’s time to look back and weigh the benefits of the wiki way.

There are so many wiki solutions out there and so many different ways to use them. Which is your favorite? How is your company utilizing wikis? Let us know in the comments below.

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More business resources from Mashable:

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- HOW TO: Use Social Media for Enterprise Business
- Social Media for Business: The Dos & Don’ts of Sharing
- 8 Ways to Create Paperless Business Cards
- 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook
- Why Big Brands Struggle With Social Media

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, furabalo

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Reviews: Mashable, Wikipedia

Tags: business, how to, MediaWiki, social media, wiki

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