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Why wiki's win
From KMWiki
Wiki approaches to content creation and navigation will have a profound impact on the way people create and access knowledge behind the corporate firewall.
Also see Andrew McAfee's thoughts in MITSloan Management Review
GLUT Mastering Information Through the Ages
[edit] It's all about the Scotty experience..
A key part of any knowledge strategy is how to connect people with content - easily. Very easily.
The task reminds me somewhat of a scene from Star Trek IV. Now, recounting tales of Star Trek films may not be the way to wind friends and influence people, but the good engineer Scotty had a scene from which we can learn a great deal.
The plotline found the enterprise crew travelling back in time to the 20th century to find a whale (long story), and upon mixing with the locals scotty needed to find a computer. Ina factory he spies a computer, presents in front of it:
faced with a 20th century computer. Picture
Scotty: Computer. Computer? Bones hands him a mouse and he speaks into it Scotty: Hello, computer. Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard. Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.
Of course, what scotty was trying to do was acquire knowledge the same way he does aboard Enterprise - announcing the topic, and then awaiting the computer to provide the knowledge.
Whilst speech recognition has not developed to Scotty standard, the development of Wikipedia, and the open source platform on which it sits, mediawiki, may be the closest thing we have to be able to deliver the scotty knowledge experience behind the corporate firewall.
[edit] Let's start with wikipedia
As you probably know, wikipedia is a multilanguage encylopeadia authored by the masses, with 1.8M articles in the english language alone.
Now, when one presents to Wikipedia, you announce the topic (by typing) and then if their is a match to the name of an article, the article is opened.
So, type in Bill Clinton, the Bill Clinton articl e opens. Type in Linklaters, the Linklaters article opens. Type in Citigroup, the Citigroup article opens.
In other words, in many many cases, and probably in most cases, an article opens rather than being presented with a list of search results.
So, announce topic, which might be knowledge on any topic (ie a person, and organisation, a legal topic, a concept etc etc) and the article opens.
Even better, if you type ABC and press enter, the page for ABC Bank of China opens. That is, there is an ABC article which is an automatic redirect to ABC Bank of China.
Ok, so that means we have a synonym matching, rapid content connecting tool.
That of itself would be very interesting, however there is more to come.
Add in:
- instant edit
- useful things like automatic creation of table of contents if you have more than three headings in an article
- tags for folksonomy categories which then provide you with an A-Z list of all articles tagged with that category
For unstructured content, the combination of scotty search, tags, table of contents and instance page generation and easy interlinking of content could have major implications for how law firms create and manage unstructured collective intelligence.
