Opinion - Wikis offer informal focus for collaboration. Despite highly publicised failures of freely available wikis in the US this year, David Tebbutt thinks these communally edited collaborations do have their uses.

Does your organisation use wiki software? If that question makes sense to you, then you are in a small but growing minority. To clarify, a wiki facilitates collaboration between people who need no more than a web browser to participate. It is simple to use and focuses on content more than appearance.

Some wikis are open and some are closed. Some reach beyond the organisation and some stay inside. Some are hosted externally and some run behind the firewall.

The best known example of an open wiki is Wikipedia, a volunteer-created and edited encyclopaedia. This lays it open to error and vandalism, but the next visitor or a volunteer editor can re-edit the page or roll it back to a pre-vandalised version.

The Los Angeles Times recently gave its readers a chance to 'refine' an editorial by publishing it in wiki form. This probably wasn't such a smart idea because, even if everyone was well-behaved, it would have been tweaked into neutrality. Not ideal for an editorial. In fact, it was swamped with obscenities and pornography and was taken offline within a couple of days.

By way of counterbalance, I have participated in three excellent public wikis in which most people behaved themselves and the odd polluted page was quickly removed. All three wikis were for industry events and participants used them to register their interest, provide personal information and influence the agendas.

In other words, they were engaged in projects of mutual interest. The genuine participants had nothing to gain from muddying the water and, because they were open about their identity, the beginnings of mutual trust started to form long before the events. The wikis accelerated ...