Saturday, November 17, 2007

Week 7 # 16 Wikis

I have been using Wikipedia as the first port of call for quickly needed information for quite some time, so I was very interested in this exercise. I was particularly interested to find that the name comes from a Hawaiian phrase “Wiki, wiki”, meaning “quick”, because I had intuitively felt that the word Wiki had a Pacific origin. The characteristics of a wiki are that they invite involvement of the user, and promote topic associations through links. Wikis are dynamic, in that when new information is discovered about a subject, it can be quickly added to the collective knowledge base by virtually anyone. This is also its weakness because authorship can be biased.

There are many wikis dealing with matters of interest to libraries. I was particularly taken with the Book Lovers Wiki, which has heaps of reviews of books arranged in different categories. How I wish I had known about it when I was running a library book group! There are even instructions for starting one’s own wiki in Wikis: A Beginner’s Look. It’s a relief to know you don’t have to have knowledge of HTML or other markup languages to do this!

There are suggestions on Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki for use of wikis for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki has links to successful library wikis, and examples of best practice. Tutorials in using a library’s digital resources would be an example of wiki use within a library – the people actually using the resource will no doubt have suggestions and tips to offer other users. Also a subject guide among students of a particular course of study would be very useful.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The wiki has great potential at the library