Wikis

I was part of the group who developed a wiki for this week, so I had the opportunity to explore not only the content provided in the readings and the case studies, but additional wiki information as well. This has allowed me to compare and contrast what I believe makes an effective wiki.

First, and a little off topic, I was astonished to learn from Schiff's article, that for every 3 mistakes Encyclopedia Britannica makes, Wikipedia makes 4. I always portrayed Wikipedia in a negative tone, probably due to many professors telling me that the information was not authoritative, but now I feel I can use Wikipedia's information more frequently in everyday life, while maintaining a critical eye. I guess it is the thought that because Wikipedia can be edited by as many people as possible, that the majority of people will believe the truth and the truth will be posted.

I also learned from this week's readings that wikis can be a great tools to bring together like-minded individuals through online collaboration. This has the potential to create niche environments in an online setting. As an example, the Princeton Public Library's Book Lovers Wiki is a great communication tool for people who love to read novels. Also, the UBC Health Library wiki is an excellent example of a special interest library providing information to help librairans in the same field (http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php?title=Main_Page).

I also enjoyed reading Farkas' article on how to build a wiki. This article was very useful for our group to find a starting point for the construction of our wiki. Farkas outlined some useful wiki templates to use, and described which ones were useful in which situations, which helped our group decide on a template to adopt. As for the case studies, overall I thought they were excellent beginnings at encorporating online collaboration between the librarians and library users, but there were also some elements that were lacking. As an example, I thoroughly enjoyed Ohio University Libraries' Biz Wiki because the creator/librarian personalized the wiki by adding his picture to the main page. He also added on instant messaging option that would be very personal and useful. These ideas relate back to last week when we discussed the combination of RSS, Blogs, and photos into webpages. I believe that if wikis were to also encorporate these elements of Web 2.0, then they would be more useful and effective. For the wiki project that my group did for this week, we created a wiki page for staff profiles as a way to personalize the wiki, and as a way for librarians across the country to get to know one another without traveling long distances.

Overall, this week I was able to explore how to create a wiki, and I believe they are great applications for online collaboration in special areas of interest. They also eliminate the need to travel long distances to meet like-minded individuals, and have many other endless possibilities.