Test Drive #3 - WIKIs

Wikis are wonderful tools! I have had recent experience working with one as a distance ed student. As a group of four individuals located in various parts of Australia, we were able to collaborate using a wiki to construct our group assignment. It worked surprisingly well and as the Common Craft video explains, it is definitely easier than bouncing emails back and forward to each other!

I was surprised to learn that a study found a wiki encyclopedia to be more accurate than its printed version. At university, the use of Wikipedia is taboo and would indeed would count against you if cited in assessment work!

Libraries could find wikis particularly useful to collaboratively produce or update a policy, like a Collection Development Policy, for example. Staff located across great distances could all contribute and at different times. This would translate into cost savings in terms of the logistics of gathering staff at one location for a specific time.

I am very familiar with Wetpaint as I have created a web site with it for an assignment as part of my Librarianship course. I had to create a web site for fictitious researchers of the fictitious Diabetes Research Digital Library. I created pages that listed useful diabetes links, detailed the library's services, provided tips on database searching and how to evaluate web sites. I had a ball doing this and although this wiki was not a collaborative wiki as such, it was a great exercise in web site design.