To Wiki or Not To Wiki? Community leads across the web love wiki technology, attracted by its flexibility and low cost, but concerned about control issues and barriers to participation. When do wikis make most sense?

I recently led a session on wiki implementation at the Online Community Unconference. The collective wisdom of the group informed the following list of factors for when wikis work best:

1) Wikis work well for groups that already know each other. In fact, in the Blogs, Wikis and Workspaces study posted earlier this year, 87% of organizations reported using wikis for internal purposes, with only 27% using them externally.

2) Wikis work well for "co-assembly" in addition to "co-editing". Projects requiring different individuals to contribute different pieces of a whole lend themselves well to wikis. Aggressive "co-editing" of content is harder to effect using wikis.

3) Wikis work well when a clear nucleus is provided. Users are more likely to "edit" than "create", so providing an instructive starting framework offering examples (and even stubs, encouraging people to edit from there) is helpful.

4) Wikis work well with a clear final product in mind. If you are building a user manual, a notes archive, or a conference web site, having a well-defined final product is very helpful.

5) Wikis work well in documenting consensus rather than opinions. If you seek an archive of opinions tied to authorship, a message board is more effective.

6) Wikis work well with short deadlines. Wikis are easy to set up and build upon.

It is noteworthy that the best known wiki in the world, Wikipedia, breaks many of these rules (it is public, includes strangers, frequent co-editing). It is a fantastic example of the power of wikis -- but is clearly an outlier with respect to how most wikis are used.

There is a terrific primer on wikis on the Common Craft site for those wanting to learn more or to educate colleagues. Other session notes from the Unconference can be found on the -- you guessed it -- conference wiki.