Apple Mac OS X Server v10.6 - Manual (Page 86)

There is no confusion about which version of the content is accurate. If people have
questions, they can review the page comments to see if their questions have been
asked before.
Reducing Spam
Emails are direct and immediate; email comes to you. Wikis and blogs are nonurgent;
you view a wiki or blog when you need to. RSS and My Page notify you of wiki and
blog changes, but neither is as urgent and direct as email.
One issue with having urgent and nonurgent information coming through email is
that noncritical information could potentially mask critical information. By reducing
emails to just those that are urgent and moving the rest to blog and wiki as
appropriate, you can focus more efficiently on critical issues. When you don’t have
critical issues, you can quickly scan through blog posts and new wiki pages.
Creating Navigable Information
Unlike email, content in wikis, blogs, and mailing lists can be tagged and linked to.
After posting content in a wiki, people can update the content without sending email
to everyone in the group.
If you tag content related to a specific project with the name of that project, you can
do a single tag-based search to find everything related to that topic. If you instead
used email to distribute information, you’d do a text search to find related content,
but you’ll find email threads that mention the project or that have many responses, of
which you want to know only the result. If the name of the project isn’t included in the
email, you won’t find the email.
When new people join a group or a project, you can send them a collection of links to
wiki pages, or a single link of a tag-based search of all pages they’re interested in.
For example, if you have a collection of orientation information for new employees,
you could search for the “orientation” tag and send them the link to the search results.
If you had this information in several emails, you’d have to search through your email
and then individually forward emails.
86 Chapter 11 Communicating More Effectively with Wiki Tools