No one who reads this blog doesn’t understand that Aaron and I are enthusiastic supporters and (when possible in the workplace) users of wikis. I could go on about the usefulness of wikis and how they can change the way we do work, but someone else is doing that better than me.

Some people, though, see wikis as being a free-form, Wild West — anyone can contribute, but many of those contributions don’t have merit or they don’t follow guidelines. In his blog at the O’Reilly Network, Nat Torkington briefly looks at process-backed wikis.

Torkington talks about how the book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual changed his view of Wikipedia and, to some degree, wikis in general. He writes:

I clearly remember thinking, when I ordered my copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, “this has got to be a new low for O’Reilly. How can it be anything but a waste of a ream of paper?” I mean, “Wikipedia: it’s an online encyclopedia that anyone can improve”. There, what else is there to say?

And:

Wikipedia: The Missing Manual talks about the invisible Wikipedia—the social and technical structures that you only see when you want to contribute. … It gives practical advice on topics like: how to improve articles, how to dispute something, and dealing with vandalism and spam. It even covers the ever-timely topic of deleting articles and “notability”.

Related posts:

1. Weekly links roundup
2. Weekly links roundup – the wiki edition
3. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays: Wikis at Royal Bank of Canada