Wiki Works - the workhorse of any social intranet

Blogs are cool, social bookmarking sites are neat, but I really think wikis are the big news in the intranet 2.0 space.

At our company, we launched a wiki last fall (almost a year ago now...wow!) and it has mostly become the internal wikipedia. The wiki contains a lot of glossary terms pulled from all over the company from different business unit's websites. This has made it much simpler to find what the specialized terminology of our business means.

However I want more! I have been using the wiki for all my intranet documentation, support lists, application change logs, etc. But how do I get other people interested?

I see one problem with our setup, a slightly modified version of Screwturn Wiki, has no security. Sure it tracks who wrote what, but I would love to have a bit more partitioning, like the Workspaces concept in Socialtext's workspace concept, allowing separate work areas for projects teams, wikipedias, and onboarding, to name a few.

So what are your thoughts for wikis in the social intranet?

Low Value Content is Destroying Your Website? I don't think so.

Is low value content the problem with intranets? I am not sure it is or not. In blog post by Gerry McGovern over at CMSwire, Low Value Content is Destroying Your Website, has some interesting information.

Most data and content that we create is next to useless. Nobody will ever be interested in looking at it again.

He also mentions that the corporate intranet is a dumping ground for company information because companies have no clear standard of where to put this stuff. Well, where does he suggest it go? In my 10 years of developing intranet sites, the reason the data exists is because someone needs it. It may be a loss leader in hits, but there is still a need.

I would rather see a bunch of infrequently used pages exist on the intranet rather than some word doc sitting on someones hard-drive or worse yet, lost forever when an employee is termed.

This seems to me to be one of the best use cases for social networking, specifically the wiki. It gives employees a place to quickly and easily empty their brains and get back on with the task at hand. The other upside, is for you GTD readers, it helps make mind like water!