#19 What's in a wiki?

A wiki is a collaborative website and authoring tool that allows users to easily add, remove and edit content. Wikipedia, the online open-community encyclopedia, is the largest and perhaps the most well known of these knowledge sharing tools.

The use and popularity of these tools is exploding.

Some of the benefits that make wikis so attractive are:

• Anyone (registered or unregistered, if unrestricted) can add, edit or delete content.
  
• Tracking tools within wikis allow you to easily keep up on what been changed and by whom.
  
• Earlier versions of a page can be viewed and reinstated when needed.
  
• Users do not need to know HTML in order to apply styles to text or add and edit content. In most cases simple syntax structure is used.

As the use of wikis has grown over the last few years, libraries all over the country have begun to use them to collaborate and share knowledge. Among their applications are pathfinder or subject guide wikis, book review wikis, ALA conference wikis and even library best practices wikis.


Discovery Resources:
Use these resources to learn more about wikis:

• Wikis in Plan English - Wikis are easy to use, but hard to describe. This video does a great job of explaining what a wiki is and why you might want to use one.
  
  
• What is a Wiki? – Library Success wiki presentation, with links to lots of examples
  
  
• Using Wikis to Create Online Communities – a good overview of what a wiki is and how it can be used in libraries.

Discovery Exercise:

1. For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at some library wikis and blog about your finding. Here’s a few examples to get you started:

• SJCPL Subject Guides – a pathfinder wiki developed by the St. Joseph County Public Library system


• Book Lovers Wiki - developed by the Princeton Public Library


• Library Success: A best practices wiki


• ALA 2006 New Orleans wiki – an example of a wiki created to support a specific event


• The Bull Run Library wiki - a wiki acting as a public library web site


• Other library wiki examples

2. Create a blog post about your findings. What did you find interesting? What types of applications within libraries might work well with a wiki?

So what's in a wiki? Find out by doing some exploring on your own.

Coming up next: Playing with Peanut Butter in the sandbox...