University is not a self-sufficient world in which students learns skills that they will apply later. It is an element of a wider learning system that encompasses problems well beyond the study years and a geographically situated campus. Likewise, a university is a complex organization not only based on the teacher/student relation but on industrial partnerships, alumni, students self-organization … This wider community has to collectively manage a huge quantity of information and realize complex coordination between thousands of people. One of the main obstacles in this is its lack of self-awareness. Thus resources are hard to match with needs and contact between alumni and their alma mater university is very often of lacking quality.

Starting from a study of the emergence of wiki communities on the internet, we describe and analyze the use of an academic wiki based on the concept of PeopleWiki (Bachelet 07). PeopleWiki is a new type of wiki, addressing specific communities. In this type of wiki, community members are themselves the main subject of information produced, discussed and archived on the wiki.

In the paper, we start by highlighting the concept of Community of Practice Lave & Wenger (91), as a process of social learning. Then we explore the typology of wikis thought authors like Challborn & Reimann (05), Majchrzak et al. (06), Gaved et al. (06), Moshirnia (07). Starting with some specific problems of wikis : authorship (Miller 05), importance of coordination and "meta" pages Voss (05), questions of leadership and collective governance (Reagle 07), altruism and motivation to contribute (Wagner & Prasarnphanich 07, Kollock 99), we put an emphasis on information systems closely related to academic wikis : corporate wikis Majchrzak et al. (06) and Learning Management System (Bold 06).

The use of wiki in learning (Forte et Bruckman 07) and higher education is tackled through the example and lessons of CoWeb, initiated Georgia Tech (starting 1997). We reflect on the propagation of academic wiki implementation (Rick & Guzdial 06), its narrow ties with constructivism and collective learning (Bruckman 98) and how it impacts the student-teacher relationship (Scardamalia 02). We also point out the limits and failures of these experiments concluding that "schools are not open source" (Moshirnia 07) and pointing out problems with grading (Lund & Smordal 06) and various modalities of appropriation (Grant 06).

In the second part, we describe the Peoplewiki which has been running for more than a year in our Grande Ecole in France, CentraleWiki and review its degree of success and the choices made in different domains. We also note that plenty of other variants have emerged: National Taiwan University, North Texas University, Davis University, Arts et métiers, HEC to name but a few. We highlight the resulting change in the vision and the boundaries of the university, the legal issues, taxonomic questions in archiving articles, our positioning as a "semi-official website" located outside of campus, the "official vs. reliable" debate and the issue of access control and regulation through a user's charter.

We conclude on future developments and an assessment of the current situation: measuring the present size and development of CentraleWiki, on its target content and its positioning in relations to the existing information systems and social networking sites.

Keywords: Wiki, PeopleWiki, Academic Wiki, Community of practice.