The same principle holds true for rapidly evolving, volatile content stores like an internal knowledgebase. Errors will creep in, but they will be detected and corrected much more quickly than if they must be processed through an under resourced editorial workflow. At the same time, the barriers to adding fresh, timely and relevant content are dramatically reduced. Incentives for contributing, commenting and rating content can further enhance quality. Such an approach clearly is not appropriate in all situations, but in a closed user environment, like a call center or an IT department, it really does work and has been successfully adopted by many organizations. The content won’t be perfect, but it will probably be better than what you have now. Never let “perfect” become the enemy of “good enough”.

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contribut