Wikis

I started out this one by checking out Appleton on Wikipedia and seeing that our library link was already there. No surprise since I am running behind.

I have to say that I find Wikipedia interesting in how it is received by the academic world. Pretty much to a person the professors I have had will say do not use Wikipedia. I find this outright dismissal kind of elitist. I have found many well written articles on Wikipedia. There are some really bad ones as well but isn't part of the library science program being able to determine the good from the bad? Keep in mind that I am not suggesting that Wikipedia replaces scholarly journals or should even be used as a primary source but if you are looking for general background or even different points of view Wikipedia can be a good secondary source.

Now on to wikis in general. I had to admit I have not really used any of the wikis until starting at the library. When I did use the wiki I found it pretty straight forward and easy to use. The only thing that I can see as a possible problem is that if you have a large and active group you could lose focus and ending up with people running in all sorts of different directions. This, though can be taken care of by having specific ground rules on how things are going to be done.

The positive is having the ability to communicate asynchronously and still be able to maintain an active working group.

There is one other problem that may or may not ever rear its ugly head. That is the possibility that the host you are using will either switch to a pay scheme or simply go defunct. There is some risk to not having control over the files. The option here would be to move to an open source content management system. You may lose support if things change but you can still maintain and retrieve what you have already done. Some of the better CMS frameworks out there offer many if not all the features found on wikis. The chief drawback here is that you need to have some knowledge to get the sites up and running and to maintain them - though it should be noted that it is not as daunting as it may first appear. I have worked with Drupal and played around with Joomla! and both offer many features freely (for now anyway).

I guess the use and how long you plan to maintain the site would also have an impact on which way to go. Either way you go you have more opportunity for communication and interaction than most people would expect from a free tool.