Jevon MacDonald writes:

Wikis have a well earned reputation of being a quick-deployment option that is easy enough to explain to your colleagues: “It sits there, and I can edit it, and you can edit it,. and it will always be there when you need it”.

Wikis are not social tools however. They are collaborative tools.

This is an important distinction, mainly because the value that social tools create comes from their inherent social components: Sharing, currency, relevance and the filters that can be built from social network data.

I’ll take it one step further: They are collaborative tools when you need them to be, but they’re also good at helping you do solo things, and things that might benefit from broader input at some point, but aren’t collaborative all the time.

For instance, drafting a news release, writing documentation, capturing research notes, or writing a letter are all activities a person can do largely on their own, and the wiki provides the benefit of a simple workspace, the ability to store that information in a secure online place that you can access them from home and work computers, and the ability to easily work on your documents right from a web browser.

At some point, you might involve colleagues, but the benefits of the wiki are there even when you’re working by yourself. A different set of benefits kick in when you do collaborative work: everyone sees the latest draft, version history lets one person see the changes made by others, no need to trade file attachments via email, etc. But the benefits of the wiki to an individual are still there for all the information that isn’t being worked on collaboratively, and that’s why it’s an indispensable tool.