Deciding between Wikis

I decided to use a wiki for my latest internet project. A wiki allows for a collaborative approach in helping with business strategy. The current alternatives for communication are phone/skype, e-mail, fax, meetings. For online collaboration, there are some interesting innovations like writely.com and YCombinator’s http://thinkature.com/ However, I feel private wikis can best suit evolving long term business strategy issues.

It's much better than using e-mail, fax, and phone are ephemeral. While this seems to be the most used method of information transmission, the information is quickly lost under a neverending waterfall of e-mails. A wiki allows a more long-term view of any particular issue. It allows you to have multiple people to shape an idea over a much longer period of time. Instead of being reactive to e-mails, you can be proactive with wikis, and have the ability to track revisions.

Wikis can tie multiple resources together easily for non-technical people. You can display resource links, useful info quickly with simple wysiwyg editing. After researching and finding that wikis were the best and fastest solution, I dug through a couple resources to try out a couple services.

I figured the best place to start was wikipedia, probably the most well known wiki, ranking in the first page of most Google searches. It was pretty difficult to edit the entries. You could insert HTML markup directly into the site. Looking through the related links, Wikipedia directed me to use wikimatrix, a site that compares over 100 wikis after inputing your criteria. I basically wanted a free wiki, ability to upload files, intuitive content creation, wysiwyg editing, and a private viewership so I could limit my wiki to our small development team.

While the matrix limited my options to 25. From these 25, I selected wetpaint, social text, seedwiki, pbwiki. I recollect hearing about social text, seedwiki, and pbwiki, but don’t remember the exact sources.

Wetpaint was by far the most intuitive product offering. From the user experience when registering, to the intuitive page creation, page customization, and well organized tutorial, it was a joy to use. The only problem was that all the information was available for public display, which is not what I wanted for sensitive business information.

seedwiki seemed very technical and not user friendly at all. not very intuitive, and start up information not well organized. Didn’t meet my criteria, but I could see how it would be useful for a more technically inclined team.

Pbwiki was easy to register, and easy to get started, but I found the tutorial to be ridiculously hafhazard.

Socialtext was not the easiest utility, but it was good enough. The page linking was great, you can upload as much as you want, and the best part is you can make a private wiki! Don’t be fooled, if you look around, there is a free personal wiki limited to 5 collaborators.

The next tool we need is a wiki spreadsheet. Come on guys, let’s get with the program! How many hedge funds or consultants would be ecstatic if you could easily edit spreadsheets online? Chop chop.