News

A Toronto software company uses them to plan birthday parties and its next product launch.

Intel uses them to post news from the company juggling club and collaborate on top-secret computer code.

A Vancouver company thinks its wikis can stem junk e-mail and global warming.

Is there anything these things can't do?

Ever since Wikipedia became the world's largest encyclopedia by harnessing the collective knowledge of thousands of geeks around the world, business leaders have been looking to adopt their own versions of the online oracle.

Now, more companies are bringing the wiki model into the workplace, and these basic online databases that take their name from the Hawaiian word for “quick” are changing the way we work. “What Facebook is doing for social interaction, wikis will do for work,” says Donald Tapscott, author of the bestselling Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. “They mark a profound change in the way we perform work.”

The idea seems almost too simple. Wikis, which are basically just Web pages that anyone can edit, provide a new medium where workers can collaborate on team projects and refine ideas about how their company should be run.

Already, one in four U.S. corporations employs some manner of wiki, according to market analyst IDC. By 2009, Gartner, a tech consulting firm, anticipates that will bump up to one in two. In Canada, several large companies have taken on wikis, including Insurance Corp. of British Columbia and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan.

At BonaSource, a small Toronto-based software company, the wiki is the workplace. It's where developers work together on their latest projects, where the marketing department refines product pitches and where everyone in the company makes suggestions on how it should operate. “It's the most important tool we have,” says Dmitry Buterin, head of BonaSource.

It also works for more trivial matters. When BonaSource employees had to plan an anniversary party, they took to the wiki in droves.

“Rather than having someone sending out a few hundred e-mails, we just posted a party page up on our wiki so that everybody would have a crack at it,” Mr. Buterin said.

When workers really embrace wikis, the entire work flow of a company can shift. Vancouver-based software developer Business Objects launched its company wiki nearly eight months ago. Already it has cut down on e-mail of the most annoying order.

“Everyone used to get those mass e-mails where someone says, ‘I don't know what I'm doing, I need help,'” says Dan Pontefract, a senior director at the company. “Then a few people hit reply all and say, ‘Well, here's what I did.' It's not the best way to have a discussion. With wikis, you can get real-time collaboration.”

Although tech analysts say most businesses will adopt wiki workplaces, a few flaws persist.

One drawback is security. Much of the hype around wikis concerns their ability to place everyone from the receptionists to clients to chief executive officers on the same virtual playing field.

When clients logged in to check on the progress of BonaSource projects, nothing stopped them from snooping around the entire company wiki. “You want to give clients some sense of transparency, but you don't want to show off what projects you have in development for other clients,” Mr. Buterin says.

“Wikis make it so everbody's equal,” says Elwin Witzke, manager of emerging technologies at ICBC. “But enterprises don't work like that.”

Security was also a problem with the first few wiki platforms that BonaSource experimented with. “The first few wikis we tried, you could only put in privacy settings if you were geeky enough to program them. The developers were fine, but everyone else hated them.”

A lack of privacy brought other problems as well.

By tinkering with the editing clearances, managers try to avoid setback suffered by Wikipedia, where rogue users insert errors at will.

But given the right mix of security and staff participation, company wikis can blossom into all-encompassing warehouses of information, both serious and frivolous. The Intel company wiki, Intelpedia, houses pages where workers can collaborate on codes and designs for new products or check news from the company juggling and sailing clubs.

In the nearly two years Intelpedia has been online, workers have visited the site nearly 30 million times and written 18,000 articles. “I think it sticks to the true wiki spirit,” says Josh Bancroft, who started Intelpedia.

Intel workers are advised not to post anything that would embarrass or damage the company. And so far, they've complied.

The most popular page on Intelpedia is a dictionary of company acronyms. “We've got hundreds if not thousands of acronyms on there,” says Mr. Bancroft. “Intel likes it acronyms. It's almost like people are speaking in an alien tongue around here.”

Among the more perplexing: EASE, or employee access support environment, and POR, or plan of record.

But just as tricky as honing security is encouraging apathetic work forces to contribute to the wiki. A neglected work wiki can seem like just another fallow time-waster like so many company blogs and bulletin boards.

“In many cases workers can see this as extra work,” says Mr. Witzke. “It requires a real mind shift.”

There are limits to what a wiki can accomplish. In May, Business Objects launched a wiki called Insight, intended to find solutions to world problems such as global warming, hunger and poverty. Two months in, the site is host to a smattering of comments.

“Wikis are only as good as people's input,” Mr. Pontefract said. “A wiki without content is not much of a wiki.”