Although it seems that they've have gained more traction and attention over the past few years, growing a successful wiki in most organizations is still often a grassroots effort, driven by dedicated technologists and content providers.These fledgling efforts are ultimately worth it, though, because wikis are flexible enough to meet the knowledge management needs of an organization in many different ways.

Stewart Mader has an interesting piece in Website Magazine titled 5 Effective Wiki Uses and How Companies Benefit From Them. In the article, Mader lays out a number of key areas in which a wiki can be particularly helpful for an enterprise: Project Management, Customer/Client Collaboration, Documentation, Online Community and Policies, FAQ, Guidelines and Best Practices.

Of these, the two that seem most obvious are Documentation and the Policies item, but I especially like both the Project Management and Customer/Client Collaboration approaches. For each, Mader gives specific examples for companies using wikis with secure, dedicated spaces intended for collaboration, updates, and information sharing.

Stewart Mader is the Wiki Evangelist at Atlassian, whose upgraded Confluence we discussed last week. Mader has contributed a number of thoughtful pieces on enterprise wikis to the Atlassian blog, as well as on his own Grow Your Wiki site. Fortunately, throughout all of these, Mader doesn't come off as heavy-handed in pushing a specific brand or platform -- his writing is more focused on the high-level benefits of wikis rather than pushing a specific agenda.

The piece in Website Magazine and Mader's other writing are well worth checking out if you're looking for new ideas or trying to help your enterprise wiki reach critical mass.