Welcome to the Astoria Rich Media WebLog

There have been a number of posts recently regarding the validity and role of wikis as an information delivery vehicle in a corporate setting. Part of the concern is the unregulated nature of how a wiki works. Because a public wiki includes user generated content there is very little control over what gets posted by who, when, and how. The most common experience framework for wikis has been Wikipedia, and as several recent incidents have proven, user generated content is by definition subjective and therefore prone to manipulation. Besides self-serving manipulation of data within wikis, there is also the dynamic of the wiki mafia (wiki administrators deleting postings they disagree with). However, whether its bogus postings, or nerds bullying each other, this particular tempest in a teapot is happening primarily in the context of a consumer application.

If we shift this dynamic into a more structured setting, e.g. user generated content that becomes part of a major corporation’s document repository, we are dealing with an entirely different set of circumstances. The flow of information, regardless of its end destination (marketing, customer support, operations, etc.) is normally under incredibly tight control. The first loosening of this control was the rise of blogs; however, most corporate employees who blog also have the good sense to realize that what they say is getting blasted out across the web (specifically, across their bosses desk), so career preservation tends to be a good content regulator. Compare this to personal blogs (particularly the anonymous ones), where anyone with an opinion can yell at the top of their lungs about anything with no consequences. Corporate blogs are a whole different animal, and much more tightly caged.

So if you take the notion of a corporate blog and loosen the filters to "evolve" it to a wiki, is this the equivalent of letting a pack of hyenas into your living room? A lot of pundits seem to think so, however, with the proper review and approve mechanisms there is no reason to assume you can’t maintain the same level of control. The benefits of a wiki as an input mechanism to a documentation process that had previously been behind an information firewall are vast. The people who are most likely to come up with good suggestions to improve a product are going to be 1) people who are out in the field servicing the products day to day and 2) people who are using the product and wish it worked better/different. This is a huge, untapped resource for any manufacturer in nearly any vertical; as long as the wiki input is pushed through a review/approve cycle. In fact, once this technology is deployed, your biggest challenge is going to be keeping up with all the good ideas that start streaming in.