No Rest for the Wiki

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So far, community content has been added to about 2,000 of those topics, with about 1,000 unique contributors. That effort has helped Microsoft expand into Brazil, because community members created documentation for Visual Studio in Portuguese. "It's allowing us to enter new markets where the market isn't large enough to localize documentation," says Molly Bostic, program manager of developer content for the international team.

Too Complicated?

Last June, eBay (EBAY) began its own community wiki project, eBay Wiki, a place where buyers and sellers can share knowledge about all things eBay. "There are lots of online communities, but only ours can boast such a huge diversity of passions, interests, and expertise from antique fans to digital photography, from Spielberg movies to Ford Mustangs," Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, said in a speech at the eBay Live conference in Las Vegas in June. The site boasts useful articles on topics such as how sellers can get the best shipping rates and how buyers can guard against fraud.

"The big barrier is getting traffic to the wiki and convincing customers to get involved," says Ann Majchrzak, professor of information systems at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. That hurdle hasn't stopped Motorola, HTC, and Deutsche Telekom (DT) subsidiary T-Mobile from creating customer wikis for certain mobile devices. The idea is not only to create community among users of these mobile devices but also to keep the user guides up-to-date, as people discover new uses for their smartphones and PDAs.

As helpful as wikis may be, much of the software on the market could stand improvement, users say. Google, for instance, uses wikis internally for a broad range of tasks, from storing notes to posting product information. "One of the things I don't like about wikis is that it's like learning a new language," says Jonathan Rochelle, product manager for Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Some vendors are addressing this problem, but Rochelle says many Google employees have instead begun using the company's Docs & Spreadsheets product, which lets groups of users make modifications and track alterations. The product is like a wiki but more intuitive to use.

Culture Shock

Over time, as wikis begin to get a critical mass of information, they tend to sprawl and become unwieldy. "You need some kind of person who sees the long-term consequences of not organizing," says the Marshall School's Majchrzak. Most often, individual contributors are not the people who will restructure existing content. Instead, that task is left to someone Majchrzak dubs the shaper—an employee who is willing to take time synthesizing information so it's easy to read. Executives need to encourage shapers as much as individual contributors. Otherwise, the wiki can become so unwieldy that nobody will use it, she says.

Others question whether large corporations are ready for wikis. "Most people and most companies don't really have a culture of collaboration and never have had one," says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal at CMS Watch, a research firm in Silver Spring, Md. "If you don't have it, all the software in the world won't give you one."

Intel's Moriarty says the tools themselves can be the catalyst for change. Intelpedia, for instance, is bringing people together and slicing through a ton of bureaucracy. "People are working on things independent of what they're told to work on," he adds. "It's connecting people globally." That's the best outcome possible in the wiki world.

Rachael King is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in San Francisco.