BusinessWeek serves up a massive special report on wikis, the online tools for building and editing information collectively. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is obviously the biggest
sensation to grow out of the wiki phenomenon, but big corporations are also embracing the tactic to build reports and share company information more easily.
Intelpedia is one such
corporate wiki. Built by Intel engineer Josh Bancroft in 2005, Intelpedia draws on the input of the corporation's employees worldwide. While some employees obviously resent their work being edited,
Intelpedia has really caught on--amassing more than 5,000 pages of content and 13.5 million page views, considerably more traffic than most Web sites.
Indeed, corporate wikis have become
rather mainstream among big companies, says Andrew McAfee, a Harvard Business School professor of technology and management operations. "If you did a comprehensive survey of Fortune 1,000 companies,
you would probably find some sort of wiki in all of them." They're particularly useful to corporations producing complicated software and hardware. Sony Corp., for example, uses a wiki to keep
executives informed about products in various stages of development for its video game console, the PS3.
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