Using Wikis to Meet Your Editorial Goals

Technology has truly transformed the workplace. Most people conduct business through e-mail and on portable electronic devices, rather than using less efficient, less economical fax machines and standard mail. But now, publishers and editors are finding that even e-mail can be overbearing at times, with floods of messages taking over their inboxes every day. Many mornings are spent sorting through these messages, trying to distinguish whether they are inner office e-mails, press releases or business correspondences.

Michelle Manafy, who serves as editorial director for the Enterprise Group of Information Today Inc., and her in-house team have found a way to organize editorial content and collaborate on special projects, using a familiar technology: wikis. As editor-in-chief for EContent magazine, the Intranets newsletter, the Enterprise Search Sourcebook, and a journalist who specializes in digital technologies, Manafy is at the center of testing and deploying the use of editorial wikis within a publishing environment.

"My in-house team uses an editorial wiki for our editorial calendars, freelance writer pool, pay rates, etc.," she explains. "This not only enables us to work remotely as need be, but it makes training new hires much smoother."

Manafy spoke with Publishing Executive Inbox on how editorial departments can benefit from using wikis and how to incorporate them into a publishing workflow.

Inbox: What exactly is an editorial wiki?
Michelle Manafy: Most people are familiar with Wikipedia, the encyclopedia site. It exemplifies the wiki ethic in that any page can be edited by any reader. The reader is the writer; the audience is the content creator. There are a vast number of public-facing wikis like this, most revolving around niche communities of interest. However, wikis are widely used inside organizations for collaboration as well. These are closed networks and password protected. An editorial wiki is a collaborative workspace within an editorial environment for use by the entire editorial team.

Inbox: How are you using these wikis at your company?
Manafy: I lead a group at Information Today Inc., which has used wikis for many of its conferences, offering a public-facing, invitation-only place for conference speakers and attendees to share knowledge related to specific events. My group uses wikis more extensively and for internal collaboration. My core team -- which produces several publications and two trade shows -- uses a wiki to maintain our various editorial calendars; our frequent contributor contact information; review, case study, news and feature pitches; and a variety of other information that changes frequently, but that all team members could benefit from accessing and contributing.