On Monday, I posted a reader poll asking how you use wikis. As of last night, 127 of you responded, and here’s what you had to say:

There were three respondents who chose “Other”, and here are their specific responses: Managing classroom information, garbage trash, and audits. Now, I can’t really say much about garbage trash, but I can comment on the other two “other” uses:

Managing classroom information is an excellent wiki use. In fact, I got started using wikis doing something very similar – building a wiki-based science curriculum.

Using a wiki for audits is a great use too – besides having all your information easily accessible in one place, the revision history the wiki maintains for every page is very audit-friendly since it shows a complete trail of who contributed information, when they did so, and what was added, changed and removed.

Jeffrey Keefer (Twitter) commented on the post and asked about a poll for education uses. That’s coming next week! He also asked for more information on some of the uses I included in the poll, like project management. Watch for that next week too.

Your team can use a wiki to collaboratively write, edit, and assemble documentation. If you publish it electronically, consider letting your audience contribute to the wiki and help build the documentation:

Anne Gentle will be sharing her expertise on using wikis to build user centric, user-maintained technical documentation at a talk in San Antonio this evening: A Technical Writer’s Role in Web 2.0 — Wiki-fy Your Doc Set.

On 20 February, the Central Texas DITA User Group will hold the next in its series of panels on wiki use. The first panel was held in January and featured speakers from Sun, IBM, Quadralay WebWorks and OLPC.

This month, the panel features: Lisa Dyer from Lombardi Software, Michele Guthrie from Cisco and Alan J. Porter from Quadralay WebWorks.

Industry Week reports on the results of a study on wikis in business by the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council (APC):

When considering use of wikis, CIOs should keep in mind that in reality, a large number of companies may already have employees using wikis for work purposes without the authority to do so. Perhaps a better question than whether unsanctioned use of wikis should be tolerated is: “How and what can be done to ensure employees use wikis productively and for the larger good?” [Read more]

Anne Gentle wrote to tell me that she and a panel of wiki users from the likes of IBM, Sun, the OLPC Project, and Quadralay WebWorks discussed DITA and wikis last night at the Central Texas DITA users group. (DITA is a popular set of XML schematics for technical documentation.) Here’s what she wrote about IBM’s wiki use: [Read more]