Oh Wiki, You're So Fine

Wandering the world of wikis can be a terrific easy way for many individuals to share their collective information on various topics. Some of the library sites I reviewed during the course of this unit were impressively comprehensive, offering a more structured format for the sharing of info than some other web-related options. But as with anything on the web these days, sad to see that this is yet one more thing flourishing under the anonymity of the internet with the potential for abuse. I've added content to Wikipedia and have seen a fair amount of childish tampering with entries. Nice to see that these sites are adding more safety measures to enable better supervision of entries added, as when used properly, there is amazing potential here for cataloguing knowledge.

As for use within libraries, I'm thinking wikis have potential for being a good vehicle for committees and task forces to share and store information that all might need access to. Having just served on such a committee where massive ongoing rewrites were needed for updating documentation, I think of the overwhelming influx of emails that inundated my box, and how perhaps a wiki might have provided an opportunity where the most recent rewrite of a document could have been posted and allowed opportunity for all members to update one common document kept in one common place. Hmm. Perhaps something to think about for future committee work.