Apple Mac OS X Server v10.6 - Manual (Page 85)

Chapter 11 Communicating More Effectively with Wiki Tools 85
Email isn’t a good medium for many types of communication. It’s not good for
information that:
Persists over time Â
Can change Â
Has no immediate urgency Â
Instructions are an example of persistent, nonurgent, dynamic communication. If you
send instructions to your department through email, you’ll face several issues:
When people join the department, you must find and then forward previous email Â
to them.
If people find issues in your instructions, you must send another email or have your
Â
department try to follow the response thread.
When people join the department, you must forward the response thread, which
Â
can be confusing.
If there’s no urgency, people might skip the email and then when they search for it
Â
later, they might see an outdated version of the instructions.
Posting instructions in a wiki page solves these issues.
Eliminating Response Threads
If you send an email to a group and someone in the group has an issue or comment
related to your email, the commenter can either include or not include the group
when sending feedback.
If the commenter includes the group, the email can turn into a lengthy, confusing
discussion, at the end of which members of the group must find the email to follow,
and then they must read through a series of replies. Every group member receives this
full thread, even if some members aren’t interested.
If the commenter doesn’t include the group, the group doesn’t get the benefit of the
discussion. Unless you send a new email to the group, only the commenter receives
updated information.
Because of all the emails that are sent to the group, group members might look at
different emails, which then adds to the confusion, and requires you to reexamine the
thread to find the resolution.
By posting the information on a wiki, people can post questions about the content as
comments, or if they see issues, they can update the content. Because this is all done
on the wiki page, people aren’t sent emails, but if they’re interested in tracking the
page, they can view updates in My Page or have an RSS feed of the page.