Thing 5

What can I say about Wiki’s? I tend to you use one wiki site over most others and that of course is Wikipedia. I find it useful when wanting to look up facts on say a certain actor. The ability to go to the one site and to see the films dates of release and the characters played etc. to be very useful. I can recall times when I have had discussions with friends and/or work colleagues on a certain event or person and when we couldn't remember a certain film name or date I would jump on to Wikipedia to find out.

Of course I don’t just use Wikipedia for my information, but for a quick source I do find it useful and easy to use.

I found the YouTube clip View this Commoncraft video ‘Wikis in Plain English’ to be a great starting point for me to gain a better understanding of wiki’s and why they have been so popular. It is such a simple thing to do. I personally think having had a wiki for when my extended family had to organise recently my grandmothers 90th birthday would have been great. The ability to make lists of “Things to Bring” etc. would have been really beneficial especially when we had 35 people attending and each person had to bring something for the celebration.

With regards to using Wiki’s in the work environment, I think the idea of a using a wiki could be of benefit when we are doing group activities such as the library shelf check.  To have a list of the areas that needs to be checked –

Example:

Main Collection -

000-200’s

300 – 500’s

600 – 900’s

Serials

Curriculum

Reference

And so on…….

If there are a number of staff who are partaking in such an activity to have something like a wiki where we can all add and edit on the one site would be terrific. We could leave messages of where we got up to with our shelf check. In a way the wiki could be seen as an electronic “white board” where staff can leave messages of their progress made.

From what I have read a wiki is great for multi collaboration around unique content. It is a great tool for specific purpose.

I still think that there is a place for wiki’s today. I am finding that many wikis are event-driven, used for a specific event or a series of events.

I feel that a wiki is meant to be a website that anyone can edit, whereas other tools such as Google Docs are for specific types of documents. And while Google Sites has wiki-like features, it may not be quite as flexible.

In another 5 years’ time from now who knows what types of multimedia tools will be out there for us the consumer. I still think though that at the moment there is still a use for wiki’s in our toolbox.