November 18, 2005

Office Wikipedia - Good idea or Bad?

I was wondering if every organization should have an office-only wikipedia. Not just an open wiki to paste anything, but a wikipedia-style encyclopedia where anyone could go and manage terms, definitions, and other company-specific concepts. I know our company has a lot of ideas and concepts that we either made-up or borrowed and changed slightly.
We already use Jot to post a lot of information, but we don't have it structured around concepts or terms like a wikipedia article.

Benefits of such a structure would be obvious, a consistent source of culturely-accurate (is that a word?) terms or concepts that anyone can quickly look up, easily. The concepts could evolve over time and employees could reuse the information in any number of important interoffice communications.

The bad? I'm not sure what the "critical - mass" size is for a really useful wikipedia format. Meaning, how many people must be participating to drive the quality of the site toward accurate and useful information? Also, it would take a lot of time for a smaller organization to get much inertia in the development of the site. Therefore adoption would be slow.

Still. Something to think about.

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2 comments:

  1. Interesting thoughts Lee. I too am trying to introduce new technologies into my company in the form of blogs, podcasting, etc. However my concern centers around how to put the power of these tools into the hands of learners in a production and regulated environment. I guess the answer is very carefully.

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  2. Thanks for the comment Mark.

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