Wikis four years on: Some thoughts

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In a comment on a previous post, DesertDonkey asked my opinion on the feasibility of a wiki for the development of an internal knowledge base. I started my reply as a comment, but it grew beyond all sensible proportions and I decided that it really needed to be a post of it’s own. It’s pretty long, so I’ve put the bulk below the fold.

The short answer? Yes, a wiki can be an excellent choice for building an on-line knowledge base. There are, however, some pitfalls that you’d want to be aware of going in. The enthusiastic may also find my “Why wiki?” write-up from a few years ago helpful.

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A sad example of non-smart web trawling

An example of a CRC cardI use GoogleAlert to look for places where my name appears on the web (a strange but instructive exercise in narcissism). I was really confused by a recent hit entitled “Example Resume Simple, Go Now“. Huh? I’m hardly out there looking for help with my resume. It’s not that it doesn’t need it, but I’m not looking for a job so I don’t really care.

So I click on over to see what’s up, and find that these guys just aren’t real bright. They have a section headed “Our top example resume simple resource” which is clearly being automagically generated by some web trawl, and it’s none too clever. It’s picked up and included a page I wrote for a class in 1998(!). If this page happened to be on, say, resume writing, this might make sense, but it’s on CRC cards (or see Beck and Cunningham’s original CRC paper) and has nothing to do with resume writing. I do use as an example the problem of one person sending their resume to another person, and it’s presumably that (very thin) connection that caused their search tool to pull that page up and include in their list of Really Great Resume Writing Resources. Ugh.

I just hope there aren’t poor saps who are clicking through to my ancient CRC page and then getting really annoyed because it’s not about resumes. Or at least that they’re not annoyed at me. I’m totally fine if they’re annoyed at the silly people at all-about-resumes.com, ’cause they deserve it. (One hopes, of course, that at some point their page will no longer include my CRC page, making this post simple a relic of a bygone era. For now, unfortunately, it’s still there.)

Weird.

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