Why a Wiki?

Hamsters
Yes, it's all about hamsters. Hamsters do what hamsters have always done. Why? Because it's what they've always done.

On 31 July 2009 a guest speaker told the school a story about a woman preparing a roast. She took it out of the fridge, chopped both ends off, threw them in the bin and began seasoning it. Her husband saw her doing this and asked "why did you throw the ends away?"

The woman paused and considered her actions. She wasn't sure. "It's what my mother always did."

Curious, they phoned her mother. She, too, wasn't sure. "It's what my mother always did."

They phoned the grandmother. "Well," she said, "my pot was too small."

Why do we use word processors?
The question is not why we use them now. The answer to that question is, well, because everyone else does. And it's what we've always done.

So why did we use word processors?

There was a time, not so long ago, when not everyone had a computer. Thus it was important to be able to take what you saw on the screen, have it imprinted on paper so that you could share it. It looked neater, certainly, than a hand-written document, but word processors were invented primarily for one purpose. The transfer of information from computer to paper.

Think about this for a moment: how many documents are shared and dealt with electronically? While a fair amount of those documents end up as paper, ask yourself how many documents need to end up as paper?

How we got lost on the way to the paperless office
In the early 90s, visionaries saw a utopian sight of an office with no paper. Trees could go to bed at night and feel safe and sound; the lumberjacks would be unemployed.

In many senses, it's the software companies to blame for this. Only now are Microsoft starting to look at real alternatives to the problems that an increasingly virtual world brings us.

Why word processors are not the answer to collaborative work
Ah: the joys of having many people all trying to edit a bit of a single document. The fun! Does the following scenario ring a bell?

Mary is compiling a report. She needs input from ten other people (ten, not a lot). Being tech-savvy, she e-mails the document out to her ten people.

In due course, which, of course, will tend to the last minute of her deadline, she will get ten replies. Mary's problem now is that she has to work out what each person has done. One clever person has changed the colour of their work to red so that she can easily see. Another has even turned the "Track Changes" feature on. She suspects that some have not changed the document at all. Word processors like MS Word have sophisticated functions to compare two documents (two, 2, deux) to see the differences between them. Doing ten might not be so bad, but doing fifty changes might lead her to suicide. Besides, the "Track Changes" for 50 people's edits could be a touch too much for two eyes to behold. The next day is wasted trying to get the formatting back to what it was (why won't people just LEAVE IT ALONE?), the right colours back and ensuring that she accurately captures each person's changes along the way.

The second time around, Mary has to get another ten people to contribute changes to another document. Having learned from her e-mail debacle, Mary saves the document on a shared area on the server. She makes sure to turn on "track changes" so that she can see who changes what and make sure that the edited bits are all good to go. Now she waits.

True to form, the last minute rolls around and suddenly nine of the ten people that are supposed to make changes are greeted with the message "This file has been opened by Joe Smith and is locked for editing." Joe has gone on leave for the day, has left his machine logged in, but locked, and now the document is of no use to anyone. Copies are made, and we end up with the same scenario sketched above with merging multiple files into one. However, it seems some people did get in to the file before Joe and made some changes. Someone even turned "Tracking Changes" off (bless) and Mary is in no better position than when she started.

Some answers
Microsoft, in their latest version of Sharepoint, seem to have addressed this issue. All you need is a Sharepoint server and training. Someone needs to know how to use the thing...

What is the answer?
This is: a wiki.

It allows for version tracking, collaborative work (multiple people can work on the same article) and it can produce exactly the same data. What's more, if you need to print it, you can. But given the fact that it's on a website and it's likely to be there for a long as your webserver, you have to ask... why?