What the wiki?

To be honest, I’ve only ever used a wiki for collaboration once. It was in a class for my Master’s program. I know it’s the politically incorrect thing to say, especially in today’s technologically dependent world, but I absolutely hated it. My teammates and I were putting together a pathfinder as an assignment. The wiki had several pages that included lists of various web resources a teacher or student might access if they were looking for information on a specific topic. The topic we chose was world myths, fables and the like. The biggest problem we encountered with the wiki is that one of its biggest benefits was also its biggest drawback. Let me explain. Wikis are supposed to be great because they are essentially webpages that can be accessed and edited by anyone who has permissions to do so. It’s a great idea in theory because it means that people who are working on a project, like we were, don’t have to be in the same room to make changes to the project. The problem with our wiki in particular was timing. If two people were on the wiki at the same time making changes, it threw the whole thing out of whack. Saved information vanished without a trace and formatting seemed to have a mind of its own. We had decided everything would be in Times New Roman font with details being 12 point and headers being 14 point. Anytime someone added something to the wiki, the fonts and spacing of items posted by someone else on the page would change. I lost count of how many times I had to re-format our text. By the end of the project, we had given up trying to make the wiki uniform in formatting, which bugged the heck out of me considering my undergrad was in print journalism. 

Despite the headaches I had in that one experience, I do not plan to write wikis off. I still think they are valuable tools with a lot of options for use in education and the library media center. Wikis can serve as a great way to get students more involved with the media center. A media specialist could use a wiki to set up a place where students can discuss and review books they’ve read and movies they’ve seen. Students could use the wiki to make recommendations to their peers and to find books they may be interested in. Wikis are a good, free way to promote the media center as well. The media specialist could easily create a wiki to serve as the library’s website. There are many advantages to this. For one, it can be edited by the media specialist and anyone he or she gives permissions to. Secondly, wikis don’t really require any technical website design knowledge. Therefore, you don’t have to know or even understand coding and HTML in order to create a wiki site. 

Another neat feature of the wiki is that users can see what recent changes have been made and when they were made. Also, it’s usually pretty easy to revert back to earlier versions if you need to. Wikis can include many types of media, such as images, sound, and video, which would make the site more attractive to its audience. Doing so will help enhance the wiki and elevate it from internet storage cabinet of internet links and ideas to a living, breathing website. Adding capabilities for visitors to comment, make suggestions or add their own two cents on things can also make the wiki a more collaborative tool.

In my research of wikis, I found there is also another good use for them that has little to do with student usage. As one author points out, wikis can also serve as great tools for internal communications. (Boeninger, 2007, p. 26) The author notes wikis have several advantages “over e-mail lists, blogs, network drives.” (Boeninger, 2007, p. 27) The biggest perk is that wikis cab be accessed by any computer with an internet connection. The author adds that added content is immediately searchable on a wiki and can be found by searching keyword, as opposed to with blogs where results are usually listed in reverse chronological order.

Creating wikis for use in the media center, and also for use by classes for specific units is a great way to promote collaboration. It’s also an easy and inexpensive way to communicate ideas with a wide audience. 

However, I think it’s important to note, there’s a difference between creating your own wiki and using a wiki found online for information. As a journalist and future media specialist, I think I must mention that wikis do not necessarily make for good research sources. Wikipedia is an excellent example. It’s great because it’s an online encyclopedia that’s free, easily accessible, and constantly being updated by people, often time experts in a particular field. The down side is that too often, it includes bad or wrong information. As a journalist, I’ve seen many times before that someone will update a celebrity’s Wikipedia page to say the celebrity has died, even though it’s not true. Those who are not familiar with how Wikipedia functions will see the information and believe it to be true, passing it on through Twitter and Facebook. Suddenly, some news outlets that haven’t done their research are reporting it. And don’t they look silly when it turns out that the person was never dead to begin with? For this reason, at the new organization I work for, we are specifically told not to consult Wikipedia when looking for information to write stories. The problem with using Wikipedia, and potentially other wikis, as sources is that you can never be certain the information is correct. Even if the wiki belongs to a highly respected educational institution, you would still want to be cautious about taking what’s said on the page as the whole truth. It really depends on who authored the material, where their information came from, and who has permissions to edit material on the wiki. You would want to weigh the references listed and verify everything written on the page. It is because of these credibility issues that I would advise students, or anyone, not to go straight to Wikipedia for information. It may be a good starting place for getting an idea, but it should never be used as an actual source. 

Here are a few examples of neat wikis I stumbled upon while doing research on the topic:

Here’s an example of how someone is using a wiki for a book club.

http://alisonpendergast.wikispaces.com/home

Here’s an example I found of a media center wiki that has a ton of resources that readers might find interesting.

http://bookleads.wikispaces.com/

Reference:

Boeninger, C. F. (2007). The wonderful world of wikis: Applications for libraries. In N. Courtney (Ed.), Library 2.0 and beyond. (pp. 25-33). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.