Thing 10

Wikis are a great way of collaboratively developing a website, but they are not suitable for every web-based project. While some websites might benefit from the insights of the community, others function better under tighter control. If you are looking to develop content that requires input from people outside of the library, a wiki is a the ideal tool to solicit that content.

A wiki is a great format for a subject guide. Because it can be edited by anyone, patrons can add to the collection of useful resources and can prune away the dead links. The librarian can moderate the wiki and decide what websites can stay in the guide, or he or she can let everyone contribute freely. It’s a great way to develop a subject guide that really represents the interests of its users and doesn’t put the entire burden of finding websites on the librarian.

These first two paragraphs are plagiarized from one of the references Phil sited. I used these unattributed quotes to make a point about the wild west nature of wikis, although the fact that they are used successfully by many organizations shows that this is a manageable problem.

Wikis are only as good as the people who make them. The corillary for this is that a wiki can be dragged down by trolls quickly without constant maintenance. One of the selling points of a library wiki is to take the workload of maintaining a site's links off the librarian but if said librarian has to spend time making sure no one has slipped four letter words into the middle of a book review where is the savings in that?

Enough complaining. I found Joyce Yukawa's links especially interesting on how wikis are used by other libraries. (Although the PBWiki update notice was very annoying.) Like many of the 23 Things I'm glad to have this opportunity to learn about these products even if I don't have an immediate use for them.

One last thing, while reading the "Cosmic Variance" website I ran across this statement by Sean Carroll: "What I really found interesting was that Ebert, after giving up on Wikipedia — and rightfully so, their physics articles are uniformly useless for someone approaching the ideas as an outsider - turned next to YouTube for edification!"

This resonated with me because I'm reading a biography of Martin Van Buren and like to fill in the details by checking Wiklpedia. I noticed that the Wikipedia had simplified, to the point of being wrong, Van Buren's involvement with the Free Soil Party. Subtly incorrect information is worse than obvious misinformation and this may be the wikis' Achilles heel.