Learning About Wikis

What follows are just some thoughts I'm having as I learn about wikis. Be patient with me, as I am starting from 0.1 (as opposed to zero) knowledge here.

So, I've learned what everybody else probably already knows: that "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian word for quick. And wikis are quick. They're quick to set up, quick to post to, and quick to search. Those all sound like good things.

The best thing about wikis is their potential for true collaboration among people with a shared goal. Wikis can be continuously evolving while at the same time preserving each generation of each page in an archive you can refer back to. That's powerful.

The worst thing about wikis is that people who have opposing or contradictory goals can post on the same wiki. Will they undo one another? From what I've gathered, there is a way to set up a wiki so that one person receives an e-mail alert each time the wiki is edited. That person can then review the edits and either leave them alone or edit over them. I need to know more about that.

This year, when we Union 28 librarians began blogging with our students about MCBA nominees, we realized partway through that it would have been nice if we could have organized the blog by book title. That way, all of the students writing about a particular book could have their posts grouped together, rather than having the posts organized by posting date. Would a wiki solve this problem? I plan to look into this for next winter. I also want to look into whether we can have a wiki that is restricted to registered users, those users being students, staff, and parents at our four schools.

There were two kinds of wikis mentioned in our course lesson for this week that particularly intrigued me: A townwide wiki and an "institutional memory" wiki. As our school has undergone many changes over the last year, I love the idea of a place for members of our school community to post what's important to them about that community. Similarly, I could envision the townwide wiki as a way for us to share vital information, something that's not always easy in a rural place with no central gathering spot. (Caveat: I was in love with the idea of the town wiki and then -- I clicked on one of the contributors' "about me" links and was taken directly to pictures of the citizen in her underwear. Not quite the civic-minded use I had envisioned.)