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Week 6: The Wonderful World of Wikis
Any tool that not only attempts to harness the collective wisdom of a group, but also is easy to use is truly amazing to me.
Before reading the articles and looking at the case studies, I thought about wikis as one person editing and replacing the work of another. It had negative connotations to me, reminding me of a teacher using a red pen to correct my work. As Solinny pointed out in her blog this week, this wiki function seems like a violation of one’s work.
Certainly wikis can be used to “search and replace” another’s work in an effort to improve the final product but wikis can be used for so much more. Wikis are terrific for letting people amalgamate their ideas, not just strike over and replace one another’s thoughts. They encourage incremental knowledge creation, as Angela Killie points out in Wikis in the Workplace: How Wikis Can Help Manage Knowledge in Library Reference Services. What a powerful concept! But people will have to rethink their ideas about authorship; up until now we have thought about writing as a solitary activity. Brian Lamb in Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not and Meredith Farkas in Using Wikis to Create Online Communities point out that notions of private property are deeply embedded in our society. Moving from competitive to collaborative ways of thinking and working may take some time for many people. Certainly in the academic world competition has taken precedence over collaboration.
Wikis are an empowering tool, levelling the playing field for the non-techie, as Farkas reminds us (Using Wikis to Create Online Communities). When I tried out our class wiki, I was amazed at how truly easy it was to use Wikis are especially suited to group projects, material that needs constant updating, and brainstorming among individuals (Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not). I agree with Aysha that wikis can serve as a great vehicle for multiple points of view.
I loved Farkas’s idea of using wikis to add functionality to OPACs (Using Wikis to Create Online Communities). Wouldn’t it be helpful to read users’ comments or reviews about books in the catalogue? Even better is her idea of using wikis as a ready reference tool for librarians. How awesome to have a tool that captures the collective knowledge of the librarians on staff.
The number one priority with library wikis should be to clearly explain their function. I thought the Butler WikiRef and Wyoming Authors Wiki did a great job of introducing their wikis. If wikis are to be used, they need to be properly marketed.
I liked the library wikis that looked like Wikipedia pages. I think most users would get the idea of the wiki pretty quickly once they made the visual connection with Wikipedia.
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I agree Pauline that integrating book information into the library catalogue through wikis would be a great idea. It’s frustrating to have to go outside the catalogue to evaluate a book and then find it again in the library system. The Toronto Public Library recently updated their catalogue and now includes images of book covers and even that little bit helps to evaluate a book. I can only imagine how wonderful it would be to have book reviews and other information included as well. Librarians just don’t have the time to input all of this information, so encouraging online collaboration in this area through wikis would be a real bonus.
Pauline, you make a really interesting point about the idea of authorship, and the sense of ownership people feel over their words. It's easy for me to appreciate collaboration on a wiki, but harder to think about my words and thoughts being altered or deleted by another person (who might not like what I have written!). Depending on the context of the wiki, I think I would be able to handle this differently. For example, if I was using Wikipedia I might feel okay about having my words changed, whereas on a smaller wiki, like a library-intranet where I actually know my fellow contributors personally, I might want to discuss changes a little more (and might even be taken aback by changes!). I would definitely need to change the way I think of ownership of my words/ideas -- and I think the overall outcome of the wiki (great ideas and documents) would be an incentive to change my perspectives.