Wacky Wikis

The tempation to commit an act of alliteration was too great for me, folks. Hence, the title of today's post.

I think that wikis could be very useful....An engineer I interviewed for an iSchool class on information behavior expressed excitement about using a wiki to clarify what was the most recent development on his team's project. But he said that he suspected that the majority of his colleagues would be reluctant to adopt this way of communicating.

(Note: these engineers are definitely confident with technology, and yet there's still resistance to learning new things, an attitude that doing so is a burden--in spite of this being potentially hugely beneficial in the long run.)

Anyway, the wikis that were highlighted were of varying quality. I believe that a wiki done well can be super convenient and gather much timely and helpful information from a variety of contributors. However, many that I've viewed seem to be lacking content. Plus they just look plain, not very sexy, and look uniform in presentation. And if those are the first examples that one sees, their imagination may be limited by these sparse representations.

My favorite wiki was the one about best practices and services in the library, founded by Meredith Farkas.

I wonder if it's possible to merge wikis...having multiple related wikis combine could resolve the problem of duplicating info and automatically beef up content. Win-win!