Home
Username:
Password:
Introduction to Wikis Tutorials

Wikis Everywhere / Commercial External Wikis

Subtitles of the Movie

In this section, we're going to discuss different wikis that are out there meeting the needs for different types of users. The first one we're going to discuss is a commercial or external wiki. The second is the workplace or internal wiki. Next we're going to discuss hobby and entertainment wikis, followed by education wikis, advocacy wikis and finally technology wikis. Commercial wikis are operated by corporations; corporations that have realized the value of reaching out to their customers via a collaborative medium. Commercial wikis are operated by companies that have realized that if they reach out to their customers and allowed them to collaborate, not only will they build a user base that is happier, that feels involved, but they also build a better product. This works well in all businesses, large and small. Companies with a large user base can utilize wiki technology to organize and present policies and procedures, frequently asked questions or FAQs and announcements. They can disseminate these quickly and efficiently to a large user base. Smaller organizations can harness the grassroots power of a wiki to collaborate with users for finding their product or their mission statement to better realize customer needs increase their value. So what we're saying here is that companies with a large user base can use wiki technology to reach out and touch their customers, to make them feel involved and to make them feel like they're a part of the company, making their product better. Smaller organization conversely use the grassroots power of wikis to refine their product, to make them better, to grow and create a larger user base. A predecessor of the commercial wiki is the commercial bulletin board or forum where registered users can post to a bulletin-board type system. This type of product has pros and cons for a commercial environment, just like a wiki does. A business wanting to implement a wiki to interact with the public needs to identify its goals and audience first. Some good examples of commercial wikis that I would like to show you now are the eBay Wiki, Sun Wikis, the Oracle Wiki and the SAP Network Wiki. So first we're going to take a look at the eBay Wiki. As you see here, it is located at http: slash slash www.ebaywiki.com. The eBay Wiki is an official eBay site that allows you to go in and post fact-based articles relevant to eBay and eBay has thousands and thousands of users, so it's really the largest user base for a wiki out there right now and you'll see here on the left that you have topics from buying to specialty sites; really a great place to check out if you're interested in learning more about eBay and contributing to a wiki. It's a fantastic site if you want to look at policies and procedures and they're always being updated and it's a great place to check out if you're into eBay. Next we're going to look at the Sun Wikis. Now, Sun Microsystems is a computing company that has just a ton of wikis out here to check out and I'm just going to scroll down through here and show you. It says here this is where contributors inside and outside of Sun Microsystems can share information with each other and with the world. So that's a great motto to keep up. Now, the Sun Wiki is organized into different spaces and on the left you'll see different spaces from about application performance tuning. All the way down here we've got lots and lots of topics on everything that you can imagine, so we're down here to Woodstock component development. So you can see that Sun is really embracing wiki technology to reach out and touch their user base. Next we have the official Oracle Wiki. Oracle is a database company; the largest database company probably and they are using wiki technology to reach out to their members of the Oracle community to collaboratively create and share content about Oracle. So you'll see here that they've got different topics, databases, developer tools, embedded technology and Oracle is just a huge company and to see them embrace wiki technology is really exciting. It really means that it's taking off and it's really going to be something. It's going somewhere. Finally, we have SAP and SAP is another company that has really embraced wiki technology to reach out to their user base. And we've got here their guidelines and FAQ, their frequently asked questions and you'll see here that they have rules to live by if you're going to post on their wiki and different wiki users and administrators who are setting up a wiki, you can choose to put these guidelines or create a FAQ for your wiki if you choose to do so, adding rules that apply to your wiki. You have the right to do that if you choose to do so. So these are just some examples of large corporations that have embraced wiki technology to harness the power of collaboration, reaching out to their users to make their products better.

Tutorial Information

Course: Introduction to Wikis
Author: Dawn Dunkerly
SKU: 33853
ISBN: 1-934743-52-6
Release Date: 2008-02-27
Duration: 3.5 hrs / 58 lessons
Captions: For Online University members only
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

VTC Sign up & Benefits

  • Unlimited Access
  • 98,729 Video Tutorials (23,265 free)
  • Video Available as Flash or QuickTime
  • Over 1026 Courses
  • $30 for One Month Access
  • Multi-User Discounts Available