2004 : Year of the enterprise Wiki

John Udell writes, the Wiki concept - a Web site that every reader can also write and edit, has flourished beyond all expectations.Ward Cunningman created the first Wiki site in 1995 to collaborate with a band of like-minded programmers on the elucidation of common software patterns. Flexible, direct, lightweight, and requiring only a Web browser to use, Wikis suit a wide range of applications. There are Wiki implementations for a dozen programming languages and content management systems. Wikipedia, the collaborative encyclo-pedia project that began in 2001, reached critical mass in 2004. Wikipedia milestones this year included the millionth article, the 30,000th contributor, and an explosion of press coverage.
2004 was also the year in which the term “enterprise Wiki” stopped sounding like an oxymoron. As have other open source technologies,Linux, Apache, Perl - Wikis had long flourished under the corporate radar. The anarchic nature of the Wiki can make it seem an unlikely ally of the enterprise information manager. Modern Wikis, though, are less fragile than they may seem. Enterprise Wikis can log transactions and can roll back to a prior version of every page. With that safety net in place, users can create, edit, and reorganize collections of documents while enjoying two crucial degrees of freedom.
First, the Wiki strips hypertext authoring to the bare essentials, making it easy for anyone to contribute. Second, unlike e-mail, blogs, and discussion forums, the Wiki promotes consensus above individual authorship. It’s hard to quantify the value of that style of work but easy to see how it might complement other modes of collaboration. And of course, modern Wikis also integrate with e-mail and blogs. A good perspective about wikis and a good overview about enteprise wikis.