Why use wikis in project management?

A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know. For questions like, "What's going on in the project," we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what's not important about what's going on in the project. What's important about the project is the stuff that you don't anticipate.

Wiki pages are very much free form. Across the whole wiki there is a hypertext structure, but on a given page, within the versatility of your command of your natural language, you can say whatever needs to be said. So wikis are a good way to track project status. You can think of our patterns work, for example, as one long running project. We didn't know what the destination was, but we wanted to capture it as we went.