Thing 22: Wikis

I admit that my own use of wikis has, so far, been very limited. Wikipedia is often my first port of call for factual information, even with all the caveats that need to be borne in mind there. My tiny contributions to that resource are enumerated in an earlier post.

And I have signed up for TeachMeet in the prescribed wiki way.

I sent an email round the Haddon team, earlier in the year, that said, in different words, "We'll get up a wiki when I've done 23things, you see if we don't." What I had in mind at that time was a replacement for emails in the description of tasks. Emails for that purpose have a way of drawing queries, which then need answers in the form of clarifications, which, to avoid a need for cross-reference between emails, means revised re-sending of the original emails.

A library application that immediately suggests itself is the planning of events. I was struck by the similarity between the holiday-planning wiki of Wikis in plain English and the emails that fly round the Haddon team in the run-up to, for instance, an Alumni Weekend presentation. A wiki serves in a situation where people are in broad agreement about the task to be accomplished, and are in discussion about means. A wiki about what was to be accomplished, and why, would presumably be harder to manage, though Wikipedia's continuing usefulness amid endless contentions is a demonstration of what is possible in that line.

Having, therefore, an application in mind already, I have put off the task of exploring all the wikis listed in the Library Success Wiki, LibraryWikis, and Anna Laura Brown's Wikis for Libraries site. For the moment, it is enough that wikis offer great improvements in method for what we are doing already. There's a limit to how much new I can do at a time....