Knowledge base and wiki software is a shared online tool in which a company's teams write their documents, keep their wiki, store simple databases and run project boards, all in one place. A wiki is a set of pages that any member of a team can edit and link to each other. A knowledge base is a collection of pages that answer common questions. When one tool does all of these jobs, it is often called a connected workspace.
Each page is built from blocks. A block can be a paragraph, a heading, a checklist, a table, an image or an attached file. Pages link to other pages, so readers can move from a summary to the details. A database in this tool is a table in which every row is also a page. The same database can be shown as a table, as a board with columns such as "To do" and "Done", or as a calendar. Each page or group of pages has its own permissions, which decide who may read it and who may edit it. The tool also saves earlier versions of each page, so the team can go back to an older version. How long it keeps them often depends on the price plan.
Take, for example, a travel agency in Jaipur with 120 staff that sells group tours. Its wiki has one page for every tour, with the day-by-day plan, the hotels, the prices and the cancellation rules. A database lists its 300 partner hotels, with a row for each hotel's city, room rate and contact person. The sales team views the database as a table. The operations team views the same rows as a board, grouped by booking status. When the cancellation rule for the Ladakh tour changes from 30 to 45 days, the head of products edits one page, and everyone sees the new rule at once.
These tools now include an AI assistant. A new sales executive at the agency types, "How many days before departure can a customer cancel the Ladakh tour for a full refund?" The assistant first searches the agency's own pages and finds the Ladakh tour page. It then gives the relevant lines to a large language model (LLM), which writes the answer: "45 days." The answer links to the page. This method is called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The assistant can also write a first draft of a new tour page, in the way that AI productivity tools do.
A wiki is different from a shared drive. A shared drive stores separate files, which must be opened one at a time. Wiki pages are edited in the browser, linked to each other, and searched together. To search the wiki together with email, chat and every other application, a company adds enterprise search. The tasks and dates of a project usually live in project management software, with links to the wiki pages. A support team that answers customers from a shared inbox can copy its standard replies from the knowledge base.