Today I had a great meeting at LMU Munich together with Francois Bry, Sebastian Schaffert, Peter Dolog and Peter Axel Nielsen discussing the potentials semantic wikis have. Before that meeting, when I was reading the newspaper, I coincidentally stumbled upon an article about the increasing number of wikis used in several industries as knowledge management systems.
No doubt, that wikis have several advantages over NOT using wikis, but the use of wikis can als be part of a new problem:
Just think about a company which just has installed it´s 100th wiki (and there are many companies out there already which run more than 5.000 wikis!!). How could this company solve the problem, that more and more information will be generated in a wiki-way but all this information is not connected to related information inside and outside the company in a meaningful way? Information is still distributed and knowledge will be re-invented again and again.
Our discussion about Semantic Wikis showed again, that there is a way to improve the wiki-way, which is only the basis for a really powerful knowledge management.
Wikis + Semantic Web = Semantic Social Web
which means, that people´s knowledge work will be really supported by machines, which won´t only render some HTML for us anymore…
