What’s The Difference Between a Wiki and a CMS?

Permissions and an edit link.

All too often we think of wikis as some special breed of software that’s completely different to CMS. In reality any good CMS should be able to be a wiki simply by opening up the permissions, removing the workflow and adding an “Edit this page” link when viewing the site. The problem is, most CMS implementations spend all their time focussing on locking things down and adding 10 stage workflows. It’s no wonder user adoption is such a problem, no one has the required permission to do anything!

So it was refreshing to see James Robertson’s article What intranet CMS’s can learn from wikis:

At the end of the day, I don’t care about the publishing tools that underpin the intranet, as long as they work and are used appropriately. I am also not arguing for throwing away our intranets and replacing them with wikis. That would be naive.

It is, however, a good time to take a fresh look at how we manage and grow our intranets, and to learn lessons from the wider community.

Indeed. Learn to find the balance. There are a lot of documents on the intranet where you need to get them right first time – critical policies and procedures etc, but there are also plenty that should be more living documents and evolve over time, benefiting from the experience of your employees. Open up those documents like they were in a wiki and you’re on the road to a successful intranet, without the confusion of having two completely separate systems.