Wikis: Breaching the Communication Firewall
Can this open source movement in content creation live side by side with other forms of communication where we like to have the final word? Wikis have shown us the art of blurring the lines between writers and readers, teachers and students, senders and receivers. Now that the firewall has been breached, a whole host of internal, external, brand and corporate communication will have to tiptoe in.
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Wikis have become such a big part of our information-hungry lives that many of us will soon wonder how on Earth we managed without them. Most people think of wikis purely in encyclopedic terms because of Wikipedia 
, the user-written and -edited online resource that some people call the best thing to happen to our always-on world.
However, if we could put aside the information-foraging aspect of wikis for a second and try to understand the underlying technology that makes them happen, we could tap into their awesome power. You don’t have to have a geek gene to start.
Quite simply, a wiki is a Web site that encourages visitors to contribute to the content by editing the pages. Changes are archived and tracked easily. Unlike many other knowledge-sharing technologies (instant messaging, for instance), a wiki can take on many different communication roles — from the “walled garden” variety that’s appropriate for secure internal communication, to full-blown wikis that can handle global collaboration. Accessible for All Ages
Then there are wikis that cater to very narrow interests or constituencies, such as the one that allows users of the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) 
Q Smartphone to create and edit their own user guide; the Motorola Q wiki has diagrams of the phone’s ports, links to software updates and more.
Whether it’s for a product or a project, a wiki can organize information and archive contributions much better than blogs, and users need very little expertise. Even grade-school students can create and maintain a wiki, which means that in the corporate world, it hardly requires IT support.Getting Into Politics
The Utah-based political Web site Politicopia.com is one of those that taps into the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon sweeping the digital landscape. The best way to explain it would be to compare it to the similarly named Politopia, which calls itself “the land of custom-made government” but doesn’t do much to allow visitor input. Politopia belongs to the read-only Web in the pre-wiki era. Politicopia, on the other hand, is a wiki created in Socialtext, an easy-to-use wiki platform.
Politicopia allows Utah residents to join — or rather set — the political debate on issues such as the state’s recent passage of a bill to allow universal school vouchers for all children. This kind of open source 
democracy could only happen in a wiki format. It’s easy to dive into and collaborate on Politicopia, giving it a sense of “open government.” In February, when the bill passed, Politicopia founder Steve Urquhart credited it with shedding “sunlight” — taking private dialogue and putting it into a public forum.
However, it’s the book publishing business that appears to be really pushing the envelope in wiki-land. Wikibooks.org, for example, allows people to create open source textbooks (as opposed to novels or creative works used in education). It is not an encyclopedia in the same way that Wikipedia strives to be; instead, it’s a place where anyone can publish an online textbook on any subject. Wikibooks currently includes “books” on acoustics, reverse engineering, cryptography, a guide to “The Lord of the Rings” and a few books for grade-school students.Multiple Experiments
Other great experiments are going on. In 2006, a group of people from the Wharton School of Business (University of Pennsylvania), Sloan School of Management (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Pearson Publishing and Shared Insights, a community education service provider, decided to jointly publish a community-driven book titled We Are Smarter than Me. It was an ambitious project because it involved, by design, hundreds of thousands of authors. Between Wharton and Sloan alone, there were more than a million “invitees.”
Likewise, Penguin Publishing recently began the wiki novel “A Million Penguins,” an experiment in collaborative creative writing. In South Africa, the Shuttleworth Foundation has started a wiki to take education and technology into the Web 2.0 era, with one project aimed at creating a peer-taught software engineering curriculum. Using Wikibooks from Wikipedia, the foundation has begun to create hundreds of textbooks. The One Laptop Per Child project has a wiki for educators and publishers who want to contribute to a curriculum that can be distributed to children receiving low-cost laptops.Join the Party
Then there’s a project that may be the definitive storyline of how wikis have moved into our business and marketing 
. Wikinomics, a real, printed book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, extends the topic into an online chapter, using (what else?) a wiki. The authors ask readers to write the chapter and join the discussion.
I know what you’re thinking: Wasn’t that supposed to be the purpose of blogs? Sure, blogs are terrific, easy to start and easier to manage and use to collaborate.
However, when you look at what the Wikinomics project is doing by organizing and collaborating with readers on constantly updated knowledge, blogs look almost dated. Wikinomics had barely hit the shelves at the time of writing, but on the wiki, readers are already co-authoring the final chapter called The Wikinomics Playbook.
If you visit the wiki, you’ll see that the authors have written a bare-bones framework for the chapter — nothing more than a few paragraphs to introduce some sections — and some questions to stimulate discussion. The rest is up to readers, who can add new content, do some fact-checking and, if they wish, make the chapter relevant to their own experience. “Be bold,” the wiki says, daring readers to shed their inhibitions and step outside their intellectual safety zones. “Share your war stories, or discuss how the issues raised in each chapter are playing out in your organization, sector or both.” In other words, take control, create and have the final word.
Which invites the big question: Can this open source movement in content creation live side by side with other forms of communication where we like to have the final word? Wikis have shown us the art of blurring the lines between writers and readers, teachers and students, senders and receivers. Now that the firewall has been breached, a whole host of internal, external, brand and corporate communication will have to tiptoe in.