Get a group of tech folks together and chances are someone -- probably the guy with the open laptop -- will suggest the group create a "wiki."

But chances are just as good that once the wiki -- a kind of virtual white board -- is up and running, it will be abandoned in favor of email. That, not the wiki, will be the communication vehicle of choice to and for the group. And everyone will promptly complain that they're getting too much email.

Why does this happen? A lot of peer pressure and a little bit of fascination with a cool, but still nascent, technology is probably to blame. However, despite some frustrating characteristics, Wikis are like the first draft of social media, where technical definitions and cultural traditions meet.

Certainly the software is used. Howard Dean's campaign used a SocialText wiki for its internal planning, progressive political blog Daily Kos's dKosopedia uses the open-source Mediawiki for some of its collaborative projects. And just last week, the Los Angeles Times set up a wiki for some of its editorials to let readers comment on what the paper had said. The newspaper’s experience, however, demonstrated something many suspect about wikis: outside a small tech-savvy group, the software for these collaborations isn't quite ready for prime time. It's a bit too open-ended and a bit too complicated, which can make the demand to use them especially frustrating for folks who know how wikis are supposed to work.

Yet, as the L.A. Times's decision to use a wiki demonstrates, wikis are, in spite of themselves, hip. Even the name’s derivation is obscure: it comes from wiki wiki, a Honolulu airport shuttle-bus service named after a pidgin word for "quick".

Why the Wiki?
So what's the attraction? Well, for those who know how to use them, wikis truly do represent a breakthrough in how the Web should work. They are a way to accumulate a repository of
knowledge with multiple contributors and display it easily for anyone to read. That makes wikis almost perfect for organizing efforts, campaigns, volunteer groups; anything where lots of folks might have lots of small contributions over time. Unlike ordinary Web pages, which require a pretty detailed knowledge of HTML markup, wikis are flexible and easy to update. And unlike weblogs, they offer a place for multiple contributors to share and contribute information. Wikis make a great complement for mailing lists and blogs, which are largely chronological in nature and not as good at building up an institutional memory. And, of course, they can potentially help stem the ever-growing tide of email messages.

To get an idea of how the technology works when it works well, take a look at the most successful of these efforts: the collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is written and edited by volunteers who write on topics of interest or expertise and whose writings are often edited by other experts -- self-appointed and otherwise -- in their fields. This is a powerful idea.

Another example is FOIA: Detention Practices Project, a part of the political encyclopedia, dKosopedia. Volunteers there are reading, collating and analyzing documents obtained on reports of torture at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Susan Hu, one of the volunteer organizers of the project, calls it "a monumental task" that is coordinating the efforts of many medical and military experts to search through the handwritten documents obtained in the Freedom of Information request made by the ACLU.

"The ACLU and the A.P.'s public dissemination of these documents is invaluable, those organizations haven't the people power to catalog key information from each document," Hu wrote in an email. "We couldn't begin to organize all of the 35,000 pages of documents without using wiki's ability to catalog, index, and cross-reference items." Still, the volunteers need help with the software they're using, she says. "I haven't had time to figure it out. One of our volunteers is writing a 'dummy's guide' to help us."

Not Quite Mainstream
It's not easy to understand how wikis work unless you know how they work. Wikis enable the reader to add, substitute or correct any page's content. For non-technical folks, though, the interface can be intimidating, often with too much information on a page and no way to tell what to do or where to go.

"Engineers, who generally think HTML is trivial [to learn], assume that wiki markup is easy to learn; and it probably is compared to HTML," says Ken Norton, vice president of products at hosted-wiki provider JotSpot. "What they don't understand is that regular users don't want to have to learn a new way to author documents.... It's not that they're not capable of learning; they simply don't want to be bothered."

A simple way to create a hyperlink to a new page, WikiWords (also known as writing in CamelCase) are terms with no spaces between words, at least two of which are capitalized (e.g. RunningTwoOrMoreWordsTogether). So anyone can suggest or request a new page just by linking. And users link just by typing the name of the word they want to see. The problem is, the average reader isn’t aware of this function, or how to make it work.

Even more frustrating, different wiki vendors use different conventions. Socialtext, for instance, doesn't use WikiWords. Instead, new links are typed between brackets, which the user can either type directly or apply with a link button.

Another big obstacle to wiki success is the fact that users must adapt to the idea that whatever they write on the wiki can be edited, changed, expanded or just plain disregarded by a crew of commentators or, "editors." The "anyone can edit it" ethos also raises worries about virtual graffiti and vandalism as the L.A. Times editors learned -- the hard way. And what about wrong information? Can't someone come along and destroy a page or add defamatory or incorrect information to it? The answer is “yes” but, like most successful group projects, managed, moderated and supervised wikis are the ones that succeed best. Wiki monitoring can reduce users' dependence on the more familiar email for group messaging, since folks stay on topic when they know someone's watching. But getting people to make the switch takes some dedication and concentration.

Moderation reduces the anarchy that can result when many people work on wikis and end up creating impossibly complicated documents. A well moderated wiki community strives to "refactor" pages, occasionally reassessing the page's organization and, when necessary, moving less important information to new pages.

What You See You Might Not "Get"
It's not like tech folks don't know what's wrong. Some of the newer wiki services, like JotSpot, are beginning to provide a wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get) editing interface. It works a bit like Microsoft's Word program, which allows users to set up documents so they appear in a familiar way to not-so-geeky users. (Oh, and while we're trying not to scare off the natives, maybe we could change the term wysiwyg to something more accessible. How about "friendly"?)

Beyond those details, the biggest barrier to wiki adoption, both in the political world and in the business world is that -- as clever as these applications are -- they are still somewhat devilish to set up, customize, and maintain. There is not yet an out-of-the-box wiki package that can be installed easily, quickly styled to look like the rest of a website, and maintained easily. SocialText and JotSpot are certainly trying with their hosted (their servers, not yours) offerings.

Like most emerging technologies, wikis simply require more refinement and adjustment. Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of hosted-wiki provider SocialText, defends the use of wiki markup over a wysiwig interface by quoting one of the fathers of the modern networked PC environment: "A long time ago, when Doug Engelbart [inventor of the computer mouse] was inventing everything that we are re-inventing now, he made the important distinction between automation and augmentation. As toolmakers, we can automate certain steps…so users don't have to change behavior. On the other hand, we can augment, have them learn a little, so they can be more productive."

Of course, whether or not wikis will fulfill that promise of augmented productivity remains to be seen.