What Wikipedia Can Teach Businesses About Collaborative Authoring

By Su-Laine Yeo (@justsystems) Aug 31, 2010 Comments

1 comment

Wikipedia is probably the world's biggest and most successful collaborative writing project. The free, web-based, multilingual encyclopedia offers site visitors millions of articles written by volunteers around the world.

Ah yes, collaboration. For many businesses, collaborative writing is almost synonymous with "pain" and practically the definition of "necessary evil." But think: On Wikipedia, collaboration is so not-painful that people do it for free. What is Wikipedia doing right that corporations aren't? What is Wikipedia's lesson for corporations about how to make collaboration work?

For most corporations, the lesson is not that using a wiki is the solution to collaboration problems. Although wikis are incredibly useful, their current limitations include poor support for printing and few security options. Having said that, consider some things the Wikipedia experience can tell us, ways in which Wikipedia is way ahead of how your projects are probably run:

Work in Regular Structure and Small Chunks

Wikipedia is a massive information set. Yet it is easy for readers to navigate, and easy for writers to expand on, in part because the entire site follows a set of structural rules. Structural rules define how the site is divided into articles, and conventions for use of disambiguation pages, categories and templates. A little-known aspect of Wikipedia is that behind the scenes, volunteers put a great deal of thought and day-to-day work into establishing and communicating this model, in addition to the work of actually writing articles.

The highly structured nature of Wikipedia lends itself well to chunking. The ability of thousands of users to simultaneously contribute to Wikipedia depends on it being divided into fairly short articles, each further divided into sections. Each article, and each section, can be edited independently of all others. The practice of breaking up a document into chunks prevents the file-lock conflicts that would otherwise arise when multiple people try to edit a document at the same time.

Businesses tend to work under the assumption that one long document = one massive file. And a common source of frustration in collaborative writing projects is not being able to work on a document because someone else "has it." At Wikipedia, an editor working on one article would never have a file-lock conflict with someone who is working on a different article, and editors can even work on different sections of an article at the same time.

Wikis are not the only technology available for working with chunked content. If you are not using a wiki, a good (if not better) alternative is XML. XML technology enables you to write small pieces of content and assemble them into much longer ones. Unlike HTML files or traditional word-processor files, XML files can be cleanly connected into a sequence, with a single table of contents, automatic numbering of headings and figures, and an index.

For Consistency in Appearance, Separate Content from Formatting

Wikipedia has managed to make 16 million articles all look the same, a feat that many corporations would struggle to achieve with two articles. The principle at work at Wikipedia is called separation ofcontent from formatting: Writers say at an abstract level what the different parts of a document are, and the actual formatting is defined in a separate file called a stylesheet.

For instance, a writer can identify that a particular phrase is a Level-1 heading, and the system will automatically format it the same way as all other Level-1 headings. On small mobile devices, the system will format Level-1 headings differently than on desktop machines, to best make use of the capabilities of the device.

With XML, you can also separate content from formatting; allowing you to take decisions about fonts, text sizes, and the color of table gridlines out of your documents and into a centrally-controlled stylesheet. Unlike current wiki software, XML technologies can also automatically put page numbers in cross-references and optimize layout for printing, taking the separation of content and formatting to another level.