As businesses grow and expand, they may choose to place more and more value on theirown internal knowledge. Countless papers have been written on the value of knowledge both within and outside of business boundaries. This paper takes the value of knowledge for granted; indeed, it will also assume that knowledge is a valuable asset that should be sought out, cultivated, and nurtured within a corporation of users.With these ideas in mind, we will explore the idea of wiki software and its usage inside of a corporation. Specifically, the concept and implementation of wiki software has shown that sharing, knowledge-gathering, and knowledge-storing among users is a desirable tool in business environments. In a study on Wikipedia, perhaps the best known implementation of wiki and a prime example of the knowledge culture mentioned, it was found that wikis are “suggesting a new model of collaboration and cooperation.” (Wagner & Prasarnphanich, 2007) A dedicated knowledge-sharing environment is critical in maintaining that environment beyond its normal shelf-life. Those key members of an organization will, at some point, leave, taking their knowledge with them. As such, the business’s environment must be one that encourages sharing knowledge. Knowledge is “a sustainable advantage” over competing companies, and also an advantage that cannot be directly purchased; an employee brought in to add external knowledge to a company will lack the circumstances in the original company that gave him his knowledge in the first place. Such an employee may not be as valuable in his new environment as he was in the first. (Davenport & Prusak, 2000, pp. 17, 55)Thus, the effort towards forming a general appreciation for knowledge management andgathering is of the utmost importance in a company. When the seeds of this have been planted,the wiki exists as a digital location wherein people give and take their ideas, procedures, knowledge, and, in some ways, a sense of themselves, in order to help cultivate that environment. Partly because of this, and due to their generally inexpensive nature, there has been a considerable growth in wiki usage in business.The wiki exists, currently, as a beacon of knowledge sharing, exemplifying nearly all facets that a knowledge-sharing environment must have. In examining the growth of the wiki and the facets of its creation, we should see a similar parallel to the recent and sustainedgrowth of knowledge management and sharing. After establishing this trend, we hope to glean useful information about where knowledge management is headed.Of course, much of this rests on a false assumption that the wiki is the ultimate in knowledge sharing; this is not the case. At some point in the future, a better tool will arise. At the moment, though, the wiki serves as both a toolset for sharing knowledge and an embodiment of the culture of knowledge sharing. In order to understand where the wiki is headed and how the wiki software will evolve, we must first understand its origins.The modern wiki had rather modest roots; it was initially created by Ward Cunningham on March 25 1995 for the Portland Pattern Repository (http://c2.com/ppr/), a group which programmed in pattern languages. Its initial, relative success was due to a strong user base witha unified interest.The original concept was based in part on HyperCard. Within HyperCard, Cunningham “wanted to make a stack with three kinds of cards: cards for ideas, cards for people who hold ideas, and cards for projects where people share ideas.” He made a single card to perform this function. Clicking the “link” would take you to that card, or, if nothing existed there, it would navigate to an empty, editable card. This idea, formed in the late 1980’s, manifested itself in Cunningham’s now ubiquitous wiki. (Cunningham, 2008)According to Cunningham, the wiki’s design was based loosely on the following principles:- Open - Should a page be found to be incomplete or poorly organized, any reader can edit it as they see fit. - Incremental - Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written yet. - Organic - The structure and text content of the site are open to editing and evolution. - Mundane - A small number of (irregular) text conventions will provide access to the most useful page markup. - Universal - The mechanisms of editing and organizing are the same as those of writing, so that any writer is automatically an editor and organizer. - Overt - The formatted (and printed) output will suggest the input required to reproduce it. - Unified - Page names will be drawn from a flat space so that no additional context is required to interpret them. - Precise - Pages will be titled with sufficient precision to avoid most name clashes, typically by forming noun phrases.- Tolerant - Interpretable (even if undesirable) behavior is preferred to error messages. - Observable - Activity within the site can be watched and reviewed by any other visitor to the site. - Convergent - Duplication can be discouraged or removed by finding and citing similar or related content.Some ideas, such as server robustness or the ideals of trustworthiness, fun, and sharing, are now native to the software, though they were not in his initial conceptual design (Cunningham, 2008).These ideas and design principles run parallel to the knowledge sharing environments that have become increasingly common in the past fifteen years. In each of the design principles of the wiki, we should see some element of the corporation’s knowledge environmentas a whole. In these cases, the whole is more than the sum of the parts.Just as a wiki’s pages are open, so too should a knowledge environment be open to reorganization and input. Every member should feel themselves a part of a larger entity and that their work and knowledge is valuable. This also ties in with the organic nature of the wiki. Reorganization, from within the organization and across typical supervisor/employee boundaries, and adaptability – again, both internally and externally – are key for an organizationto stay competitive. Indeed, “managing knowledge should be everybody’s business.” (Davenport & Prusak, 2000, p. 108)Similarly, the mundane and universal nature of a wiki lends itself to open cooperation between members of different groups. Understandably, it can prove difficult for those in one area of a corporation to converse with those in