I feel like a wiki spokesman here.

If you have a website of your own, either for your studio, you personally, or the game itself, and can install software on it, put the wiki up there. Alternatively use one of the hosting services that let you make a wiki there. Same sort of cloud computing advantage with easier formatting. The editing and posting is much like a really large forum post so it may be even simpler than what you are use too.

I'm with JasRonq. Use a hosted cloud if you cannot set up one of your own. Otherwise use your own intranet and a good version control system.

Decent wiki software has version history, sometimes even with branching history, page locking to prevent simultaneous edits, and plenty of user privileges controls.

What about google wave? I read it's the next big thing in collaboration software

Google wave (at least as far as I know) slows down a lot and starts lagging when you either type a certain amount of text in, or put in a certain amount of messages. I've seen several examples of this (and tested it myself with a friend), since google wave is hardly even in beta, that'll probably get fixed later on. But right now... Well. At least the official google server lags. Me and a few friends are gonna try setting up our own google wave server when we have the time, with a private membership, just to see how it works ^.^ (If anyone with the experience and interest wants to try it: http://www.waveprotocol.org )

Though I'm pretty noobish, in my experience wikis can be a **really** powerful tool, especially for complex systems. Google docs can be really useful, given their accessibility and streamlining, but I've always found it a bit too simple. For a pretty straight forward project I find word easier to use.

The great thing about wikis is that for more complicated databases, interlinking and nested pages work so beautifully. At any given time the page you're looking at only contains the exact information you're working with, and if you need to check anything else, a properly built wiki allows to to jump to that instantly without dealing with whatever formatting your linear document is using.

I see the biggest problem with wikis being the greater level of infrastructure you have to set up before you can get anything done.

If you're interested, you might want to check out Tim Ryan's article on the subject; it's worth a read (if you're into that sort of thing). Certainly a more through analysis than mine.
Learning the Ways of a Game Development Wiki


[Edited by - kovalai on January 18, 2010 4:27:42 PM]