Wikis: Thing #10

I enjoyed the entry on Wikis, which are a quick and easy way to collaborate. The little video on planning a camping trip was great--my own camping group could have used that tool when we first started planning an annual camping weekend, although we've been doing it far longer than Wikis have been around!

I was sorry to see that some of the example Wikis are no longer active, particularly the one on library best practices. However, I think that shows that Wikis are particularly useful for collaboration on a specific, focused activity or topic, rather than perhaps having them just go on and on. I made an entry on the "23 Things" Wiki, and I noticed that someone has suggested a focus topic on strategies for marketing books, which provided a good focus for sharing.

Pooled knowledge can be very useful, particularly when one knows and trusts the people in the pool. That's one of the problems with Wikipedia, which isn't banned as a resource at my school, but any information that students find in Wikipedia they are asked to verify in another source. I've read articles comparing entries in Wikipedia with entries in Britannica Online, and several of the Wikipedia articles were found to be more complete, especially about topics in popular culture about which there is lots of information out there that might never be considered important enough for a serious encyclopedia like Britannica. In other words, there are topics about which Wikipedia is likely to be an excellent source, so the idea of banning it entirely seems short-sighted.