Organizations, especially larger ones, have pockets of information that are known to only a handful of people in particular department or group. But these pockets of information can often be useful to to other teams and other projects. Think about how many times you’ve stumbled across something that should have been common knowledge in your enterprise. And think about how annoyed you were when you found it.

There are a lot of reasons for this kind of lack of collaboration. It could be that someone is trying to protect their little empire. Or, they don’t think that the information that they have will be useful to anyone else. And it all sits in a folder on a network share gathering digital dust.

Wiki evangelist Stewart Mader looks at some of the boundaries to collaboration in many organizations. Mader writes:

Wikis, for example, give teams a place to aggregate and organize their work in a centrally accessible place. They can choose to keep certain information private and accessible only to team members (and they should, when necessary).

Of course, it can be tough to actually get an organization to adopt a wiki (Mader’s book Wikipatterns offers some excellent strategies that can help you). And you have to deal with familiarity (or lack thereof) with the technology. As my colleague Keith Soltys recently learned:

It does make make your life interesting when, for example, one development group is happily embracing a wiki for their documentation, and another group doesn’t know what a wiki is.

Of course, WikiPatterns offers some advice on winning over potential users, too.

Related posts:

1. Fostering user and author collaboration
2. DocTrain West day 2: all wiki, all the time
3. A few style guides