That’s the closing line from a recent piece by John Rotenstein which looks at the mindset necessary to use a wiki effectively. John uses the example of the person in the audience of my talk in Sydney back in July who asked how to use the wiki for document management. With a wiki, it’s not about document management – it’s about the contents of that document – the knowledge. Getting that knowledge out of the confines of the document is the best way to get people involved in its collaborative development: “Document management can only point you towards documents, like a traditional search engine. In contrast, when you’ve got information on a wiki you can search for information, link to it, reference it, update it, secure it, blog about it and share it.”

John’s post is an excellent read, especially his thoughts on keeping knowledge in a central location where everyone can access it, as opposed to sequestered on individual computers.

Zoli Erdos also tackels this topic in Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle which is also an excellent read.