Weekly Readings: Wikis
I had never edited a wiki (let alone set one up or managed it as many people in this class seem to have done) until posting my book lists on the wiki Amanda set up for this course. All the information in this week’s readings, therefore, was new and interesting to me.
While I understand that the main focus of a wiki is on collaborative work, I found some of the examples that used wikis in novel ways to be some of the most interesting. For example Chad Boeninger’s Biz Wiki at Ohio University was a really useful site, though not technically a collaborative space, where he had leveraged the searchability and malleability of the wiki to keep his subject guides fresh.
Some of the wikis in the cases studies as well as the ones that came up in the readings were really well done and compelling. One I liked personally was the Library Success Wiki (mentioned in Using Wikis to Create Online Communities). What a great place to find vetted information on topics that are of importance to librarians!
A theme that came up (and I think will come up week after week, as it relates to social software in general) is letting go of control. It’s clear that the person who creates and administers the wiki can control how much or whether people can contribute to it, and some have chosen to make their wikis less collaborative than others. In a true wiki that lets everyone edit the work of everyone else (such as Wikipedia) rules seem to emerge as to what is acceptable and what is not, but I wonder if using a wiki in a work setting is as easy. I imagine that it must take some practice to get people to let go of the ownership of their work. To me, this is one of the central issues in using social software.