Vivian Wagner of E-Commerce Times interviewed me recently about wiki use in education. In the article Wikis in Education: Teaching Students to Share Knowledge, we discussed how I converted The Science of Spectroscopy from a static website to a wiki, so that it could better serve the community of teachers and students using it.

Regardless of whether a wiki is used in education, business, or government, the key to success is focusing on a specific project, topic, and audience:

Mader attributes the success of this site and other educational wikis to their specialized content, aimed at a specific audience. Rather than thinking of wikis just as online encyclopedias, Mader encourages educators and students to think of them as a focused method of sharing knowledge within a defined community.

“The success of that site is the narrow topic focus,” Mader added. “Trying to build a big, all-purpose wiki site is hard to make successful.”