thanks for the nice words on Wikka. I agree that the popular security concern (“in a wiki everyone can edit and read anything”) is truly unjustified. Several 2nd generation wiki engines (including Wikka, but surprisingly not MediaWiki) offer fine-grained ACL allowing admins to determine who has privileges do access specific kinds of content (e.g. who can read/write/delete a page, read/write/delete a comment, upload/download a file etc).
We’d love to hear more about your experience using Wikka: if you want to share some ideas or requests, feel free to start a userpage on our website or pop by on our #wikka IRC channel at freenode.net

When I read your comment, at first I thought “who would want to add to that?” but considering it more, I agree with your comment about the “relatively controlled” environment enabled by a wiki. (actually I think, perhaps it would have been smart to implement one a long time ago, but that’s another story). I’m wondering whether a wiki coudl actually make some aspects of discovery easier and more clear for all the parties involved. If nothing else, it could centralize and give order to a lot of chaos in a way that e-mail archives or instant messaging or a file server can’t. But I think it might be able to do more too.

Our electronic communication methods now record and disseminate all kinds of communication in ways that nobody used to think about or intend. I believe you essentially said that this can lead to errors, and I would guess, often errors that take place this way can come about even through good-intentioned efforts. It’s a massive amount of work to find and understand what these electronic artefacts are and mean.

With e-mail, it’s sometimes hard to understand the path of the message. Has it been forwarded outside of a work account? Who has been copied on which messages, did they see the entire string of messages or only part? At which points? Did the person forwarding a message change any part of it before forwarding it? Was the content of an attachment accurately represented or received? There are more issues, but e-mail is wild. It gets passed around very easily, and often though innocently, with little understanding of what the actual content (including things like tone of voice, intentions, etc.) of the e-mail message may mean or refer to. Unlike e-mail, wiki pages are not so easily sent to outside mail accounts, nor can they (if set up this way) be changed from person to person without the open and visible tracking of those changes.

In an e-mail, people might be prone to summarize or leave out important points because these points might not be necessary to their particular message (though perhaps very important in some other way) or they don’t take the care to recopy all the information needed or are just careless. Maybe they don’t have the most up-to-date information to refer to in their messages. Again the easy linkability of wiki pages encourages people to link to the same, already existing pages (rather than reinvent the wheel). If they need to, they can correct and update those pages (of course, the history is typically tracked by the wiki with the person’s name, a timestamp, and before/after views), which are then also available to other people that need them. In other words, instead of having many copies of some information that could be inaccurate, there could be a page that many eyes refer to and visibly maintain its accuracy.

A wiki might also decrease the confusion that results when someone innacurately responds to a forwarded or group e-mail, because s/he didn’t read the entire string of messages or certain key recipients were left off and didn’t have full knowledge of what was being written about. I suppose there is no guarantee that anyone will read an entire wiki page either, but at least there is just one version of the wiki page rather than any number of copies of different e-mail accounts.

The wiki, though it feels at first glance like a lot of chaos, actually imposes a transparent control on its content which e-mail, instant messaging, shared file servers, etc. lack. If people were to use a wiki more frequently and e-mail less frequently maybe it would ultimately save a company a lot of work during a legal discovery process.

My opinion is that such posts in relatively “controlled” environments such as wikis pale in comparison to the rubbish that can be broadcast via email, instant messaging and the like–all of which is also discoverable in such situations.

Any thoughts on this, or any information that might be useful on this topic?
Best regards,
Lee