What comes to mind when I say wiki?

Perhaps Wikipedia, the online user-created & edited encyclopedia. Maybe your answer is weird or even mysterious because the wiki-language is foreign to you. Whatever comes to mind, you probably already know that wikis are set up to be extremely contributor-driven, be it by creating pages, associations between pages (i.e. Multnomah Falls and Oregon Coast Aquarium = places in Oregon) & helping to maintain a high standard of quality writing & content for each entry.

Wikis don’t have to always be for encyclopedia-like purposes – they are a great tool to use for a company’s internal use. Whether you’re documenting a specific deliverable-making process, stating company days off or even keeping count of personal days used, a wiki can serve as an effective online site where everyone from your company can contribute to help make some processes & guidelines not as transparent and help streamline some things you may not have documented in the past.

Amplify Interactive has our own wiki we use to collaborate with one another. It’s called the Amplifyiki (we’ve been brainstorming another wiki name for several months now…). We personally use Wikispaces as our own private wiki host, though there is a whole slew of other companies that provide private hosting for your own wiki.

Here are some examples you can use for your own private company wiki:

• File-naming guidelines
• Correct processes to manage ‘x’
• Lists of resources to use for article syndication / press releases / social media marketing / etc.
• Compare each employee’s head of hair (or lack thereof) and award the best one as being the Hairy Champion of the most Fine Head of Hair
• Identify & critique worthwhile WordPress plugins
• Telephone forwarding instructions because it’s a gosh dang process to forward your company phone, which should be a fairly easy process but is a a surprisingly convoluted process
• Passwords & logins
• Much, much more

So if your company doesn’t have a wiki in place already… you should definitely look into setting one up. The ability to document processes & encourage employee collaboration will most definitely help your business be faster & more efficient at what they do.