In this interview, Ward Cunningham suggests that "A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know," and discusses the tradeoff between wiki authors and readers.

Read this Artima.com intervew:

http://www.artima.com/intv/wiki.html

What do you think of Ward's comments?

I use wiki in two different ways - a personal journal and a place for sharing resources and ideas in our group.

As a personal journal, I simply create pages for things I learn, include links to resources and associate concepts and ideas. Besides being a personal journal, it is my idea log, resource directory(with useful context) and my learning log.

As a group tool, we use it as a dynamic knowledge repository. These pages are semi-structured collections of information, resources, knowledge we gain, lessons we learn about what works and what does not. We even maintain specs of products we are working on, with one page for each feature and a list of features in the home page of the project etc.

Finally wiki words are great concept connectors. After sometimes they become the shared vocabulary of the group like CollaborativeTools, PatternsOfCollaboration etc.

We get so excited by the wiki that we try to give it to all our customers. Sometimes it is successful and sometimes it is not.

I think without something like Wiki, you cannot have an effort like wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) going.