Blogs vs. Wikis

In an ever more global environment, the need for remote collaboration continues to increase across all industries and organizations. With more sophisticated digital documents and media emerging in our every day and professional lives, most of us find ourselves in dire need of easy and effective collaboration tools. Both blogs and wikis serve an important role of helping people within and across various locations, groups, etc., converse, discuss, share and collaborate on any topic. Both allow for various people to discuss a topic, share documents, links and resources.

Blogs tend to be more limiting in that the layout, format and publishing is restricted to the owner(s) of a blog, and ultimately, they can claim ownership and censorship over material on the blog. Wikis allow people to edit/modify page layouts and contents more freely, and therefore allows for more versatility in terms of collaboration. This is way wikis are preferred over blogs in creating knowledge bases within a corporation or educational institution.

Both present problems within organizations in terms of controlling information, as they both allow for information to be easily and readily disseminated. Many institutions/organizations find themselves trying to balance the push towards collaboration against their current management and operational structure. As Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV stated in a Sept 8, 2009 NY Times Article entitled Pentagon Keeps Wary Watch as Troops Blog, "We as an institution still haven’t come to grips with how we want to use blogging."

Ultimately, blogs and wikis can be successful only if content is shared openly and freely. As Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales stated in a Harvard Business Review article, "If everyone’s afraid to modify a page on a wiki that was written or edited by senior management, what’s the point? Corporate wikis work best when management encourages everyone in the company to put forward ideas in good faith."

With organizations continuing to accept and adapt their communication and organizational structure to the needs of collaborative environments, it will be interesting to see the next wave of wiki use. We might even find ourselves using wikis to collaborate with our elected representatives in hammering out details of proposed congressional bills!