There is a difference between an enterprise or internally facing wiki (inside a firewall) and that of an Internet based or external wiki (outside a firewall). While the platform can remain the same and the basic purpose of collaboration is the same, it is their application purpose and the types of data collected and maintained on these systems which is different. Enterprise wikis contain team and project type information. This information usually consists of information such as team member, colanders, project statuses, inventories, and processes. Enterprise wiki contain large portions of information for a limited or closed set of people. An Internet based wiki is a wiki which provides information about an organizations good or services to a much larger user base. Internet wikis serve much more in an information sharing, education, and marketing capacity and less in a project management and process documentation capacity than that of an Internet wiki.

Because there are some differences in these two types of wikis, there are also a number of other items that must be considered when building an Internet wiki versus that of an enterprise wiki. The main factors you will want to address in an Internet based wiki will be:

• Ease of use
• Speed (User Response)
• Scalability
• Security
• Content Moderation
• Skins (Look and Feel)
• Navigation
• Metadata

It is not that these items are not important in an enterprise wiki, they are extremely important but there are a number of items which take priority in an enterprise system such as:

• Flexibility
• Plug-ins/Extensions/Adaptors
• Integration (mashups)
• Email integration
• RSS feeds
• Content change notification
• Training
• Job function application
• APIs

Again the reason for the differences here is because most people will use the Internet based wiki as a repository for viewing and collecting information on products, technologies/systems and services. The user base will most likely have about a 1-2% user contribution rate, where as in an enterprise wiki it would not be unreasonable to have an 80-90% contribution rate meaning that 80-90% of the users have contributed at least once. So with an Internet wiki the more users you have the higher qualify information you will have. This isn’t necessarily the case with an enterprise wiki where the quality of information will largely be a result of a concept understanding peer review, benefits of adoption, and mainly education.

With an Internet based wiki you will want to focus on the skins to make sure they adhere to your organizations branding standards. Internet wikis also have the potential for explosive growth as well as vandalism items which are much less of a concern in an enterprise wiki. If an enterprise wiki has scalability or navigation issues you can tell the user base to hold-on changes are on their way. On an Internet based wiki system your users simply don’t come back if they find the site aesthetically unappealing, unreliable, or no responsive enough. Therefore with an Internet wiki system you will want your site to have a very professional and appealing look and feel so that no matter what is contributed it is well presented. This will make visitors less hesitant to contribute to your company’s public collaboration space. You will also want to have a process for moderating content. Removing liable and unseemly content will be important in maintaining an environment that appeals to the greatest number of contributors and promotes participation.

Enterprise wikis are slightly different in that factors that contribute to the greatest adoptions and collaboration are benefit to a person’s role, education, and a clear contribution strategy. What is meant by this is that people are often willing to contribute but they will say they don’t know where to put something. Having clear information architecture, a method for easily navigating it and educating the users on the basics of the information architecture will greatly drive adoption.

An enterprise wiki will also need to be much more flexible because it will be used in a much wider capacity than that of an Internet based wiki. For any one organization the wiki might be used to keep track of customers, part number, manufactures, suppliers, shipping, operations, training, and other function required by and organization. So one will want to look at watch features a particular wiki has and in addition how that wiki can be expanded in capabilities this is usually done through plug-ins. Different wikis call them different things such extensions, modules or adaptors. Whatever they are call their purpose is to expand the capabilities of the wiki.

Since on an Internet wiki some of the main concerns are speed, reliability, and security you will not want to just start adding plug-ins without carefully considering each and everyone. Each plug-in generally expands the command options or feature set therefore that code much be processed before a page can be displayed. The more plug-ins you add the more code that must be processed per-page therefore adding vast amounts of unnecessary will not only slow down the response to the user with each line of new code you must consider the security implications.

Craig Tobias
Senior Solutions Architect
Cisco Systems

To the bigger thought: I think one day we’ll discover that there is very little difference between “documents” and wikis. Online documents will evolve, with links in and out there won’t be finite begin and end-points, just links, links, links. Online editors already support collaboration, version conrol, etc. That means documents are becoming like … wikis!

At the same time the better enterprise wikis can do all the “freezing” you’re talking about, so within a wiki I may very well have work-in-progress as well as finished products.

Finally, I fully agree with you, using wikis for projects, businesses is entirely different from the Wikipedia case. In fact sometimes I think wikis would get adopted faster without the Wikipedia analogy.