Wiki-wiki-wiki (Thing 10)

The Commoncraft on wikis was informative, a good primer. My only previous wiki experience was with Wikipedia entries I came across occasionally in Google searches.

The first thing that popped into my head when I watched the Wiki video was this: I wish they would have had Wikis in 1996 when my friend and I co-wrote "BC for Dummies." After our first year of teaching, we wrote a manual for the next year's newbies that told them of things like how long it really took to get that first paycheck, which items were not-to-miss in the school cafeteria, and who to talk to to get things fixed quickly. We put a lot of effort into it, but once it was "published" (photocopied), it was difficult to keep up-to-date. Yet it was a good enough resource that veteran teachers wanted to get their hands on a copy of it. A wiki would have allowed hints and tricks to be shared by anyone, and anyone could easily have benefited from it.

After that nostalgic trip, I took a look at some real wikis.

The first wiki I took a look at was Library Success. Right away, I noticed a problem--a lot of the information, particularly about conferences, is outdated. There seem to be a lot of phrases like "2006 SLA Annual conference will be held in Baltimore, MD, June 2006." As a potential user of a wiki, that would throw up red flags for me right away. I suppose it's because everyone is a writer but there are no editors to check up on things, but when I visit a website with outdated information, I'm always hesitant to believe much of what it says.

On the other hand, the section on "Social Networking Software" includes links to various libraries that are using such software. I can see where this would be useful, as anyone using these types of applications could add their name to the list.

The Blogging Libraries wiki led me to this interesting blog, which is exploring some of the same things we are in 23Things: http://newtrierlibrary.blogspot.com/ Their header: Let's begin a discussion of powerful web tools that may change the way we teach and learn.

I looked at several wikis, including the 23Things and MN150 wikis, but I really didn't see that I had anything useful to add, so I just played around with the Meta Sandbox.

I think wikis can be useful, but unless I happen upon one that I'm knowledgeable enough to add to, or am a member of a group creating one, I think they're going to be a mostly "read-only" endeavor for me.

Edited a few minutes later: I did a quick Google search on "travel wiki" and found http://wikitravel.org. I went down through the levels until I found something I was familiar with, and I edited the entry on New Ulm to remove three restaurants that are now closed. http://wikitravel.org/en/New_Ulm_%28Minnesota%29#Eat I think the tea room is now closed as well but I only took off the ones I was sure about. I can see a site like this being useful, but there are a lot of flashier, more popular sites, like TripAdvisor that provide similar information and allow user reviews to be shown rather than having individuals edit the posts.