Week Two -- Wikis

Day 1: First, I think this assignment took much longer than the first; I am not nearly as familiar with wikis as I am with RSS feeds and blogs, and I felt I needed to read everything (and everything that everything linked to) before I could attempt to create my own wiki. I was frustrated that there wasn't just some "wiki compatibility engine" where I could plug in my requirements and have the engine spit out the wikis that matched my needs. I thought the chart on Wikipedia was nearly incomprehensible, and Wikimatrix asks you to "select the wikis you want to compare...," except that I wouldn't know one from the others. I selected MoinMoin, because that was mentioned in one of the readings; PBWiki, which I've heard of and subscribe to an RSS feed from; and WetPaint, which we're using for the class, to compare. Time to read everything: 2 hours.

Day 2: Well, I finally created my wiki . Members of the MLA community, not just of this course, are welcome to participate in it. I'm just exhausted from designing it (the Book Club template was the closest I could find to what I wanted, but then I still had to go in and fix all the page titles and the links to them; then I added a couple polls to facilitate decisionmaking regarding resources to add to the site). I'm hoping that some altruistic individual will create pages based on categories, (like Retirement, Healthcare, Long-Term Care, End of Life Issues, etc.). I have an account on Furl related to news items and useful resources for older people, and wouldn't it be great if I could just export all of those into the wiki? But I don't see how that could be done. Rats. Time to create wiki: 2-1/2 hours.

Day 3: You knew I just had to tweak the wiki a little more. I think I'm finished playing with it now, so if you'd like to join it and start participating in the discussion before we add resources, please do.

The assignment asked the question, "How do you think you could use a wiki at your library? How do you think patrons could use wikis at your library?" I'm a solo, so I wouldn't be collaborating with any other librarians; and on the course blog, someone mentioned that library policies and procedures could be put on the wiki so that if the librarian left, there's be someplace for the new librarian to find necessary documents. But we have an intranet at work where all of our documents are backed up, so I wouldn't need a wiki for that. However, I could work with other people on non-library policies and procedures (my library is part of a research institute) ; it would be easier just to have everyone work on the wiki rather than keep emailing everyone the latest draft with all the "track changes" in it, or worry that someone can't send or accept an email because the attached document is too large." My patrons could use it to collaborate on projects or publications together, although at this point I'm not sure how this would work if people are using different bibliographic citations managers, how would they be able to keep their references and reference numbers straight? Maybe that depends on the type of wiki, or the template of the wiki that they would need to use.
"What's the difference between a blog and a wiki?" A blog is more like a one to many medium, where the moderator makes a statement and then permits others to comment on it, but others do not have the ability to change what the moderator said. A wiki is a more cooperative venture, enabling all participants to write and edit their own and others' information. Still there are different levels of power possible in a wiki, but there is much more freedom of expression available on it than on a blog.

Anyway, this was an interesting assignment.