Exercise #16

What's in a wiki?

A wiki is a collaborative website and authoring tool that allows users to easily add, remove and edit content. Wikipedia, the online open-community encyclopedia, is the largest and perhaps the most well known of these knowledge sharing tools. With the benefits that wikis provide the use and popularity of these tools is exploding.

Some of the benefits that make wikis so attractive are:

• Anyone (registered or unregistered, if unrestricted) can add, edit or delete content.
  
• Tracking tools within wikis allow you to easily keep up on what been changed and by whom.
  
• Earlier versions of a page can be viewed and reinstated when needed.
  
• And users do not need to know HTML in order to apply styles to text or add and edit content.
  

As the use of wikis has grown over the last few years, organizations all over the country have begun to use them to collaborate and share knowledge. Among their applications are internal communications, information for customers/patrons, and FAQs.

Discovery Resources:
While these resources focus on the use of wikis in libraries, the concepts are applicable to numerous organizations, businesses, and departments. Use these resources to learn more about wikis:

• Wiki’s: A Beginner’s Look – an excellent short slide presentation that offers a short introduction and examples.
  
• What is a Wiki? – Library Success wiki presentation
  
• Using Wikis to Create Online Communities – a good overview of what a wiki is and how it can be used in libraries.

Discovery Exercise:

1. For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at some wikis and blog about your finding. Here’s a few examples to get you started:
   
   
   • ResilNetsWiki– a wiki "designed to facilitate collaboration and provide the content for the ResiliNets portals" at the University of Kansas and Lancaster University
     
   • Book Lovers Wiki - developed by the Princeton Public Library
     
   • ASU Wiki Directory- link to one of the many wikis at Arizona State University to discover how they are using wikis.
   • Any wiki on a topic in which you are interested.
     
   
   
   
2. Create a blog post about your findings. What did you find interesting? What types of applications within ITS might work well with a wiki?

So what's in a wiki? Find out by doing some exploring on your own.