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Wikis

What Is a Wiki?

A wiki is a type of collaborative work space. A wiki is a collection of web pages that encourages users to contribute or modify the content. By using a simple web interface, a community can collaborate on developing a document or web page, no matter where they're located.

Wikis can be public facing, meaning that anyone can see the content, or be available to a defined community within or across organizations. Wikipedia is one of the most well–known public wikis.

Types of Wikis

A wiki can be either open or closed, depending on the preferences of the community using it. An open wiki allows anybody to make changes and view content. A closed wiki allows only community members to make changes and view its content. Some wikis allow anyone to view content, but only members can edit the content.

Why Wikis are Important in Government

Knowledge Sharing to Improve Products and Outcomes
Wikis take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds. Through simple and open editing features, wikis encourage users to add and edit content, making it easy to improve products as people add their knowledge. Wikis can be used to collectively identify issues, problems, and solutions and develop products and outcomes.

Working Together Across Boundaries
Wikis can foster collaboration both within government agencies and across agencies, including different levels of government. Wikis can break down barriers to collaboration, such as employees who work at different locations and have different access to technology. Wikis can help bring greater continuity and cohesiveness to communities that are fragmented or within organizational silos. Given the limitations of teleconferences, e-mail, and face–to–face meetings, wikis can help the government build strong and productive communities of practice—in a short period of time.

Engagement
Wikis are so simple to use that it's much easier for others to contribute to the product or solution. This may be government employees working on a project or the public helping government develop a product or solve a problem. Wikis are one tool that can be used to get more public input into governing.

Transparency
The shared knowledge of a community is available to all members, which builds trust. Every change on a wiki page is recorded and viewable. Wikis make visible changes made by every member, along with the date and member's name. The community determines who can contribute and view content

Better Project Management, Time Management, and More Efficient Use of Resources
As a collaborative work space, which allows advanced document and content management, a wiki decreases the time, energy, and resources expended by each member.

  • Travel to meetings is dramatically reduced
  • All work products, resources and discussions of the community are fully archived using hyperlinks. Everything is easy to find and right at hand for all members.
  • Rather than attaching documents in emails, you just include the link to the document's location in the community repository. This eliminates delays and network congestion associated with large emails.

Because everything is stored online in a coherent manner, you don't have to take the time to store and organize each document and email locally. Much less storage is required and less time is spent storing and finding items. Versioning problems go away, and all content is available to any member who has Internet access.

Wikipedia and Government Information

Wikipedia is a very popular source for people to get information. You should check what Wikipedia has about your agency or program. If there is nothing yet in Wikipedia, it may be appropriate to write something. If there is information, you should check it for accuracy and correct it if necessary. See for example the USA.gov article [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usa.gov] on Wikipedia

First, look at Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest policy. Essentially, people who work for an organization have an implicit bias, so Wikipedia is careful about organization's editing pages that relate to that organization. Wikipedia is very serious about Conflict of Interest problems, and many editors will revert changes on sight if it looks like someone has a conflict of interest. Persistently making COI edits can get you banned.

Most of these rules are in place to make sure people don't do things like promote themselves or remove criticism about their activities. For the most part, updating broken links and incorrect information should be uncontroversial, but you should still be cautious that your changes aren't misunderstood.

General guidelines are:

  1. Make an account, and have only one person edit under it. Disclose on your user page that you work for your agency.
  2. As much as possible, suggest changes on the Talk Pages of articles you want to update, and have other editors make the changes for you. (Every page has its own talk page--it's the tab at the top labeled "Discussion.")
  3. If there aren't any active editors on that page, or no one responds to your proposed additions, go ahead and add or change the information in the article, but note that you did so on the talk page.

If you're open and honest about your changes and don't try to use Wikipedia to skew information in your favor, everything should be fine. Wikipedia has its own guidelines for editors with conflicts of interest.

Examples of Government Agencies Using Wikis

A wiki created by a global community of volunteers in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2005. Using three tools that included a wiki, volunteers from around the world organized and regularly updated information that was critical to individuals and organizations affected by the disaster. These volunteers drew upon diverse languages, cultures, tools, and skills—from people they had never met—to create an online community and quickly respond to the crisis. The site and story is at http://www.tsunamihelp.info/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.

Resources

Wiki Tools Available for Government Use

Learn from Government Wiki Pioneers

  • See the presentation by Susan Turnbull at Government Web Managers Conference, May 2008

Learn about Wiki Work" beyond the Federal government

 

Page Updated or Reviewed: September 2, 2008

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