Saturday, March 13, 2010

Thing 16: Wikis

I have had some experience working on a Wiki years ago after hurricane Katrina hit and I was volunteering with a group of parents and students who organized the donation of backpacks of supplies to be sent to affected New Orleans residents. The organizers used a program called seedwiki, and working from home, on a Mac, all those years ago, the wiki interface was not happy with the web browser we were using (it was Safari). We had to specially load FireFox so I could successfully update the page I was in charge of. I have no idea if this PC-chauvinism is still a problem with some wiki software, but I suspect it probably is...

Our new intranet is in a wiki format, I believe, but I don't believe it's open to all library staff to edit it. I doesn't have the same obvious wiki format, so maybe I'm wrong there. Anyway, One very obvious wiki application would be a library staff listing wiki. We never have an up to date listing of where staff are working, and every time I try to get the person who's in charge of updating it to get a new one out, they say that the staffing is in flux and it would be a lot of work for nothing. If we set up a wiki, all staff members could edit and update it very easily.

As far as using wikis for the general public (say, soliciting reviews or suggestions for subject headings), I still have a concern about quality control of the information. Maybe something moderated would be best in our setting. I can certainly see the appeal of letting everyone add content. As long as it doesn't get too raunchy or malicious!

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