Here Wiki, Wiki, Wiki

We have all heard the term two heads are better than one. This day and age we use the term collaboration which means to work with another or others on a joint project. Collaboration is all the rage among corporate executives these days, one such collaborative device is a wiki.

A wiki can allow people on different continents to work together, or it can improve the efficiency of a multi-person office. It's all because wikis encourage collaboration. Wikis, first popularized by Wikipedia, are interactive Web sites that allow multiple writers and editors to produce and distribute content collaboratively. Wiki software automatically tracks revisions and changes, providing a convenient audit trail, and (if necessary) the ability to revert back to previous versions. While Wikipedia may be the best known example, wikis are not only becoming the first place people turn when conducting online research, but also when they're looking to build specialist online communities. Ward Cunningham, the man behind the very first wiki, described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work."

A better description would be a wiki is the simplest collaborative content management system that could possibly work. Now that we know what a wiki is, the question becomes why should anyone use them? What are the benefits? The biggest and most obvious benefit is that wikis are a great source of free information. While not every wiki is free to use, most of the ones found on the web do not charge any money. And, because they are the collaborative work of many different people, they often contain a lot of good information. In many ways, the rise of the wiki has turned the Internet into an easy-to-use library of reference material. But finding a list with all the wikis to search, now there’s a task.

Data Wiki: http://datawiki.googlelabs.com - This service allows you to create a wiki based on structured data. Most wikis are currently based on unstructured data. I haven't tested this service yet, but it seems to offer the possibility of creating a database that you can create, edit, and share (and allow other users to edit and add to). I think that might be a great way to present structured data, like a listing of book printers, a series of recipes, etc. It's not clear right now, though, how you could monetize that content.