Wikis for Projects and Collaborative Authoring

Michael Angeles has just published a great article entitled Using a Wiki for Documentation and Collaborative Authoring.  He makes some nice points and sets out some best practices for getting started using a wiki in team environments -- in his case a staff of information workers. 

He notes these as best practices for sustaining use and growth of the wiki:

• Train your users -- Hold informal training sessions at the beginning of your project and make yourself available to help users on an ongoing basis
• Keep it organized -- Invest time in creating and maintaining category pages, and when you see uncategorized pages, talk to the author about putting them in a category
• Understand use -- Watch the recent changes page to understand how people are using the Wiki
• Lead by example - Use the wiki in all of your project work and to document commonly used staff resources, processes and procedures
• Protect -- Public Wikis may be open to edit-spam, so protect yours and back it up often
• Style guides

He also talks about an article that I've found very influential in my work:  Malcolm Gladwell's discussion of the loss of the knowledge creation process in his New Yorker article, The Social Life of Paper.