The Quick and the Dead - Wikis in the Enterprise

Below is an impromptu talk I gave on the use of wikis in the enterprise. Basically, not a good idea. Neither, using wikis in the enterprise; nor posting impromptu talks on your blog.

5 things I learned about using wikis in the enterprise:

1. Wikis are great lightweight authoring tools that allow non-technical staff to publish and share articles quickly and inexpensively within a community.
2. Wikis often grow virally as a grass roots effort within a community and grow beyond their intended community, but they lose momentum and end up containing outdated or incorrect information.
3. Most wikis are designed for open sharing among small communities and don't provide granular security to manage user access to information on an enterprise scale which can lead to serious compliance issues.
4. Wikis often grow quickly but provide very crude search capabilities, so valuable information can remain locked inside.
5. Wikis can contribute to information sprawl; providing additional destinations for knowledge workers search for information to do their jobs. Okay, I am getting email, I go to the corporate intranet, there is SharePoint, now there are three different wikis to search with different URLs.