[WikiEN-l] What Knol may actually be: enterprise wiki substitute

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com>:

> On Dec 14, 2007 4:03 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> (I'm a *tremendous* fan of office wikis. Best idea ever IMO.)
>
> I love them, but I also find it nigh-on impossible to fight the
> corporate need to CONTROL them in useless ways.  They tend to want
> complicated permissions structures and stuff like that which end up
> ruining the wiki idea under a pile of red tape.
>
> -Matt

There's another serious problem: public wikis work great because they 
harness to
a large extent what would be procrastination time. In essence, Wikipedia is a
[[distributed computing]] system using human brains as the substrate.{{or}}.
People are less inclined to work on office wikis in their free time. So one is
using up resources that would get used productively anyways. There might be
other advantages but the primary advantage of open-wikis is substantially
curtailed.