What Is a Wiki?

My name is Joe Kraus. I'm CEO and co-partner of Jotspot and I'm here today to talk about what is a Wiki. Very simply a Wiki is a Web site where anybody who has access to that Web site can not only read it, they can change it. And what is it good for? It's great for collaboration.

So let's talk about the problem. The problem is how do people collaborate today and the answer is e-mail. So let's imagine that four people are having a conversation trying to decide what to put in the next version of a product. Well, how do they do that today? Generally, somebody starts the conversation by sending an e-mail out and then people start responding, both to one another and to everybody else, and before you know it, you have a huge thread. But eventually a decision is made. So here's what we're going to put in the next version of the product and that e-mail gets sent out to each of these people and then gets locked away in people's in-boxes. So what happens next usually is the CEO or somebody else says, "What did you guys decide to put in the next version of the product"? He doesn't know, so somebody has to dig this e-mail out and send it to this person. So one big problem today is visibility.

The second problem with this is, do they have the latest version? It's hard to know. Maybe there was some other discussion that occurred and somebody else has a newer version, and that's the thing that should have been sent to the CEO.

Next problem is, somebody new joins the conversation that's part of the team. They ask the same question, "What are we going to put in the next version of the product?" and again somebody has to dig this e-mail decision out and e-mail it to this person right here.

Let's contrast this problem in this way of collaborating with collaborating as a Wiki. So again, a Wiki is a Web page or a Web site, accessed through a browser where anybody who has access to that page can also change it. So now here are our four people who are talking about what to put in the next version of a product and instead of writing an e-mail, this person writes some content on this page and now everybody starts editing and changing this content. So first off, you always have the latest version. I know that if I go to this page, it will be the latest information. Now if this CEO wants to know what's going on, they simply go to that page, so visibility is greatly improved. I can only spell.

The next thing is, you can attach relevant documents in a Wiki to any Wiki page. So in the e-mail example, one problem is maybe there's documents relevant to this discussion about what to put in the next version of the product, that maybe they live on this person's hard drive and these people don't know about them. Now you can simply attach them to the page, so you can attach documents, so you have more of the relevant info in the same place. And finally you can actually add e-mails or attach e-mails to a Wiki page so all of the relevant e-mail discussion is in the same place as well.

So again the old way is collaborating over e-mail, multiple threads back and forth, information locked away in people's inboxes, no visibility, and who's got the latest version. The new way, the Wiki way, all the information in one place visible to everybody at any time and always the latest information.