Wiki Revisited

Though I still think concept of a wiki, how a community can add and edit all material forming a giant knowledge bank is a wonderful think, I do have an example to add shows the flaws in the current system.



My sister works in a large multinational company providing customers with information on weilding and safety products. She's currently on a project creating a knowledge centre, an intelligent database that provides production information based on how staff answer a set of questions. When justifying the expense of this program with the people with the money one of the questions she faced was "Why should we go to the expense of this program when staff can just look up wikipedia for the information?"



Her explanation was as follows:



She took the example of bottled gas. She noted that bottle sizes and standard colouration for the bottles differed greatly in Australia from the examples given in the article. So a customer refered to this site by staff or staff using this information would then be in error when it came to ordering. They would ask for the wrong sized bottle and when it reached them assume they had the wrong gas.

Wiki's are often seen my many of our customers as their 'one stop shop', but it's just not so. It's good to know that good judgement and research skills are still needed in the age of the computer.