Friday, March 14, 2008

Thing 10 - Wikis

Well, wikis are kinda cool. I played around with Minnewiki (MN Public Radio's music resource) and Wikipedia, adding some things to both. Interested? Search for Strikepoint under Groups on Minnewiki. And I added a link to a MP3 file in the handbell entry on Wikipedia. What I don't know is how you know something has been changed. For example, in the Common Craft video about the 4 friends going camping, how did each person know when they should look at the wiki and who else had already seen and made changes? [OK, I have seen that there's a tab labeled Watch in some of these wikis, but I haven't -obviously - explored that.]

I expected more from the Library Success/best practices wiki. I thought there would be more narrative in a lot of the categories. The article "Using Wikis to Create Online Communities" has a section about using wikis in libraries that has some good ideas. I have seen a library online catalog that includes the ability for patrons to comment on/recommend materials. (Can't remember if that was an example for a Thing or if that was linked in a listserv email....) I really like the idea of doing a staff wiki for communication.

No comments: