I don't think it's a stretch to say that blogging, once considered so strange and scary and geeky in a business context, has finally joined the mainstream in corporate communications.

Wikis, though...no, those are too strange, too scary, too geeky to have a place in the enterprise. Oh, maybe your software team uses one. But that just reinforces the point, yes? It's all right for technical types, but what about the sales team, or HR?

It's time to demystify wikis, and the best way to do that is to convince ordinary people to start playing with them. To that end, I do NOT recommend that they begin by editing entries on Wikipedia. Maybe I would have suggested that once, since Wikipedia is so well-known; but there are so many issues now around what constitutes proper editorial practices and what is and is not "noteworthy" enough for inclusion that it feels like sending hapless newbies into a minefield.

Instead, start by watching "Wikis In Plain English", a short video by Common Craft. Watching this zippy little demo recently, it struck me that my wife and I are planning a trip to New York City this summer--just the sort of use for a wiki that Common Craft suggests. I thought it would be great to have a place online where we could plan our trip, a site that both of us could easily update and which could include links and media. But would a wiki be too strange, scary, or geeky for my wife?

Not at all, as it turned out. I set up a private wiki on Wetpaint, a free wiki-building service. (It really is as easy as Common Craft makes it look.) I quickly created a home page and a Things To Do page listing some places that we wanted to visit. Within a couple of hours I got an e-mail from Wetpaint saying that my wife had created a Possible Hotels page, with links to each hotel's Web site. She also put a link on the home page to a New York Times article about touring the city's art galleries.

Pushing the geekiness envelope, I called up a Google Map of Manhattan and placed virtual pushpins in the places that we wanted to go and the hotels we were considering. I then linked to the map from the home page.  Now we had an aerial view of exactly how far we'd have to go in order to collapse in our room at the end of a tiring day of sight-seeing. This new information led us to dramatically revise the Possible Hotels page.

Since then I've discovered that you can embed schedules and calendars in your Wetpaint wiki, which will be tremendously helpful in planning the trip.

So, yes: the wiki, despite its odd name and the disconcerting amount of Pokemon information on Wikipedia, is non-threatening and useful. You probably have a small project in your life that could use organizing--give it a try.

Shameless plug: The Metia Software team would probably like me to mention here that wiki creation is now included in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which they are very good at customizing and deploying. Just in case you're interested.