Group Project: Wikis

By Chris, Jennifer, Katrina, and Kristen  

Please visit our wiki at http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/archives_canada_staff_wiki/archives_canada_staff_wiki

For our group project on wikis, we decided to use Seed Wiki technology (http://www.seedwiki.com) and create a wiki for a special library setting, intended to be used by the staff members as a way to communicate with each other.  We chose Library and Archives Canada (appended for our project to Archives Canada) and tried to think of things that staff members would potentially like to see on a wiki that they may not see on their public Internet site, or their internal intranet site.  We also placed a special focus on summer students working at Archives Canada so that they could connect with each other and discover more about where they work and with whom they’re working.

We have created a few pages on our wiki and have added content to them: a Rules page with our basic guidelines, a FAQ page for general questions, a Staff Members page to get to know full-time members of Archives Canada (and locations for Archives Canada), a Summer Students page for students to connect with each other, and a Useful Links page with an extensive list of links that may be of interest to staff members).

  Wiki technology is fantastic for the kind of project we created because anyone can edit the pages: anyone can post questions (or answer them), delete obsolete content, add current information, and create an infinite number of new pages (clearly demonstrated with sites like Wikipedia!).  In essence, the only limitation would be a lack of access to Internet, but anyone with a connection and who can follow the instructions that any wiki-creation site provides can work with a wiki.  The editorial work is a lot like working with a basic word processor, and you can include text, pictures, links, and so on; thanks to widespread familiarity with word processors, it should not take long for most users to learn how to edit wiki content.  As mentioned, anyone can work on a wiki; hence, if our wiki was in use by Archives Canada, students and staff would all be able to contribute equally.  This is advantageous over a blog, in which only one person (or a select group of people) can update the site; with a wiki, the responsibility to update is shared among many people.  This also meant, as group members, we were able to edit each others’ work, and we are able to see previous versions of our pages (another advantage of working with wikis).  It was very easy for us to work on the project at separate times and locations as a result.