Last spring, New York University art student Kacie Kinzer conducted an experiment: Out of cardboard, she built a little robot with a smiley face. This robot, called the Tweenbot, had one ability: It moved forward – nothing more, nothing less. Kinzer took this little fellow to Central ParkWashington Square Park, attached a little flag with its indended destination (the other end of the park), and released it.

What happened? Well, the robot did what it could do: move forward; and since it could move only forward, it got stuck a lot – in pavement cracks, on grass, or driving into trees. But whenever that happened, a friendly person came by, and put the Tweenbot back on its path. Some of the helpers corrected its course by just nudging it with their foot, while others went to great lengths to free the robot when it got stuck under a park bench.

Finally the little robot arrived safely at the other end of the park. Remember: This was in New York, whose residents are not known for their helpfulness. And the outcome wasn’t an outlier either: Kinzer repeated the experiment several times, and all of those re-runs were successful.

Collaboration between Strangers

When I heard this story on a TED talk last week, I couldn’t think of any better metaphor for how a wiki works: A large number of people, most of whom don’t know each other, contribute each a little bit of their time and knowledge in order to create a complex result.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about: Wikis are among the most prominent social media tools. They allow a large number of people to create texts together, and run on a simple principle: Everybody can contribute.

The best known wiki, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has entirely been written by a community of volunteers. It is the sixth most popular website worldwide, consists of millions of articles on any kind of subject in almost a 100 languages, and its accuracy rivals the one of Encyclopedia Britannica.

Wikis not only have to collect text – for example, OpenStreetMap is a wiki for geographic information, where people can add places, buildings, and descriptions. OpenStreetMap is like Google Maps, but one where users can describe where the streets are, and how they are called.

Other wikis restrict the write access to specific user groups. For example, Medpedia is a wiki for health information, written voluntarily by health professionals.

Why does it work?

Wiki participants are intrinsically motivated to contribute – they have not been officially tasked to do so, and don’t get paid for it; they do it for a variety of personal reasons, ranging from the willingness to help others, to the hope of demonstrating expertise and improving their online reputation, to the need to correct false information they see online, to being fed up with having to answer the same questions over again.

Looking at the success of Wikipedia, it is easy to imagine applying the same principle to corporate settings. Wikis can be used to collect corporate knowledge, such as in company encyclopedias, as repository for project teams, to draft texts together, or even as a real-time, editable list of corporate rules.

Wikis are my favorite social media tool, and I see them as an important part of the future of internal collaboration. What do you think: Where could wikis improve the way you work?

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