eWEEK recently published a story that presented some real-life examples of wikis that have worked at work. As writer Dave Greenfield mentions in his story, an effective wiki implementation requires a careful balance of control and freedom: Too much of the former and you stifle creativity; too much of the latter and the wiki becomes an unmanageable mess.

But I think a wiki also needs to be seamlessly integrated with other enterprise apps.

Some of eWEEK's edit staff is using an open-source wiki to apply better management to our story filing and editing process. The wiki is great for providing transparency into the process. So far we're not using it to exchange ideas and input knowledge. That gets done in e-mail and IM.

And, there's one of the main problems with wikis--or portals, or groupware, or whatever the collaboration app of the day is: Too much information in too many places. Our wiki app is fine for what it is, but, to grow it, I think we will need to make it easier for people to move in and out of it from our other corporate apps. Whether that's possible using what we currently have, I don't know. But the technology definitely has promise for us, and we'll continue to work on it.

When it comes to wikis, blogs and tagging systems, most of what you need to build out an Enterprise 2.0 deployment can be open-sourced and stitched together. Find out how one company did just that from Jim Munz, senior user experience developer at Optaros, an IT consultancy.

Are you using a wiki at your organization? How is it working? I'd love to hear your thoughts.