Do we really need wikis when we’ve got online docs?

A wiki is a cute concept still hunting for proper application. Sure, it has a rocking video, poster child and its fun to say “wiki” three times in rapid succession, but is it really satisfying any organisational (business or informal) need?

Collaboration
We all like to collaborate. We even prefer saying that we want to collaborate. We therefore like wikis because they promise great collaboration. Wikis, however, are forcing users and readers to activate their minds in filtering content and assigning importance. If we can all add pages and edit content, how do we know what’s valid and definitive? Two options:

One can read as much of the wiki as possible to make sense of everything. This is not ‘fast’
One can gravitate to where the most activity is. This is not an accurate reflection of content value — like the blogosphere and primary school, conversations happen to be social status definers: I’ll comment on your post/entry so that you think I’m smart

Online documents
Posting a spreadsheet or document online reduces emailing multiple versions of the same source document around. Like Wikis promise. But they come with far stronger functionality (in Google spreadsheets I can create a project plan that outputs a Gantt chart) and “web 2-ness”: I can chat to viewers of the document and subscribe to RSS feeds of the changes.

Training
Wiki mark-up is ugly. As sin. It’s like learning how to format instructions for the super collider in Hungarian. Without curly braces. Ok, some wikis allow more intuitive mark-up, but to operate Wikipedia one needs more degrees than a thermometer. Its non-intuitive mark-up, and if its meant to keep the barbarians out … well, we know that they still get in to deface entries. Marking up is difficult; deleting huge swathes of researched text is not.

Culture
Do wikis fit in corporate culture? In theory, yes. They can be used for FAQs and manuals and the like. But it presupposes that a manager in HR or marketing or product development needs to edit and align the information in them to ensure the correctness. In that case, we have duplication and hierarchical knowledge issues.

Online documents are just an extension from the desktop to the internet. While they minimise the email and synchronisation problems, they offer the usual channels of process and functionality knowledge workers come to expect. They could benefit from some of the functionality of wikis, namely the ability to basically create a linked document. For simplistic purposes, I’m not even talking Zoho online documents here.

If you use wikis and can not feasibly find other technology that could do the job better or with less process disruption, please comment below.