Week # 8 Wikis -- I did it!

I have wanted to learn more about wikis for a long time, especially how to make or edit one. I've been at several conferences where people like Stephen Abram have encouraged libraries to edit wiki entries, as a way of publicizing special collections the library holds on the wiki topic.

Great idea -- but I've never done it. Wikis have always seemed complicated to use. And yes, they are. The help pages really take some concentration.

But I persevered, and I was able to post a correction to the wikipedia entry about my home "ghost town" of Dawn Mills Ontario.

Would wikis be a good thing for our organization to use? It depends how easy they are to use.

For at least a year, I've been thinking of creating a wiki around Library Materials Selection / Collection Development. This thought started when I began job-sharing with Jill.

I set up a DOC (as in Hummingbird), and gave access to various people so they could read and edit it. (nothing much happened with this.) But DOCS is hard to use: you have to remember/guess exactly what someone called the doc to find it. You have to be logged in. You can open more than one version at a time, to compare versions, but you can only edit one version at a time.

Would a wiki be easier than a DOC?

hmmm.... I wouldn't want the Collection Development wiki to be public. So I think the login and finding problem would be the same.

Would a blog work just as well as a wiki?
People could comment on comments and eventually make a new post. Skip wikis, we could "harness the collective wisdom of the users" with a blog, couldn't we?

However, what I don't like about blogs, as a content repository, is their chronological nature. I would have to scroll back to 2007, to see the first version of my Collection Exchange guidelines, for example.

But wait, can you get around this by tagging your entries -- so all the posts about, say, Collection Exchange, would group together?

Obviously, I'm thinking out loud here. Does anyone have any answers or comments for me?

BTW, while I was exploring the Library Success Wiki, I found Thing 67: Stress Savers, and within that, something that might help end password schizophrenia [aka what username am I here and now?]. It's Where is Your Username Registered? Of course that helps only if you keep your username constant (or almost constant).