Although wikis have a slew of uses that translate into increased efficiency in any business, lets look at a small, immediate example. Most of us have been in a situation where we have e-mailed back and forth between colleagues trying to get the wording just right on an important e-mail. If it’s just one other person you’re lucky, but what if you toss another person into the mix – after all, you can’t leave out the rest of the team for something that important. There will no doubt be some hesitation when the “final” copy is done and everyone has revised it – are you sure you have the most recent copy?

Luckily, a wiki solves that problem. Any changes that are made are kept in history, so you can easily see what the difference is between version 1 and version 20. In fact, you also know immediately if someone else is already editing the copy. But wait… how do you know when someone else has updated it if you’re not watching the page? RSS of course! Management by Feeds strikes again, and a damn good practice if we may say so ourselves.

Beautiful, isn’t it? As Josh Williams recently said, starting a company is tough. We went into this with the idea that it would be difficult, but wow – we certainly were not prepared for this in the beginning. To top it off, we’re separated by 1000 miles and one international border. If you’ve ever thought you had internal communication problems, try building a company using instant messaging. Thankfully, we had a wiki.

When we started to build StikiPad, we were using the very software we created as a tool to not only collaborate, but also to just store ideas that struck us at random moments. Rather serendipitous, yes. We all hate being interrupted when we’re focusing 100% of our attention on a problem, and a wiki lets you put the idea down without being a nuisance. Using a wiki really helped minimize the tedious job of checking back and forth with each other on what had happened throughout the day. Then, during our nightly debriefing (you are debriefing at the end of the day, aren’t you?), we already had a basic agenda prepared for us.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg though. Charles wrote about using wikis to help their business and really goes to show that they can be used for every function within a company. Whether it’s a team of 2 people or 20 people, wikis are essentially a platform that gives you the ability to share information and minimize the time it takes to access that information.. and in our two-person team, we need every extra minute we can get.