Wiki is an awesome piece of collaborative software which enables anyone with just a browser to contribute and maintain shared information/knowledge. In the past my teams have used it to maintain project level information like faq's, process information relating to build, checkins, codereads, release, new hire pages, install docs and what not.

Usually I find that wiki's are much better than having a set of word documents checked into some project or database for the simple reason that the latter makes it harder to access, make modifications and check them back in. Many issues come up like read/write access to the shared repository, necessity of having some office clone installed on the machine you are currently working on etc. And to round it up, most wikis have cool features like full text search, title search, ability to view history and restore a page etc.. which makes them far more flexible than the usual alternatives.

Once we started using the wiki, the rtfm equivalents on my team have been "Did you read the wiki?", "Can you put that on the wiki?" "why is not on the wiki?" etc.. :)

Want to try it out? Try out the wiki sandbox .

You can find a lot of implementations to choose from here

If you are in a software company think about why your team is not using a wiki !!