The Wonderful and Frightening World of Wikis

Until this past Summer, my experience with wikis had been limited to using Wikipedia. Since then I have edited Wikipedia more than once. I have helped with this wiki and been a co-founder and administrator for the Technology Petting Zoo wiki, and I have created and administer a wiki for the Wild Rumpus, the System Youth Services, which, mainly because of the strong support from Janis O'Driscoll, it is well used. I also established a wiki using MediaWiki (don't ask, there is nothing in it), and one on Wet Paint for the corkball players (virtually unused). I muse about the differences between the complicated wikis hosted on a server, such as MediaWiki (designed by the folks who created and administer Wikipedia, mainly for Wikipedia, it is a very rich, but very complicated thing) and web-based simple services such as Wet Paint and PBWiki on my blog post at econolibrarian.

I learned many hard lessons, as we all have. Wikis can be a way to organize disparate strains of information that a group can use to fill a collaborative purpose. For example, wikis can be used to plan events such as Staff Day, or to organize a meeting, such as some of the Family Place page on the Wild Rumpus page. Wikis can be used as a substitute for a web page, where everyone can write, without needing to first learn something as complex as HTML and CSS.

Part of the problem with wikis is that anyone can change anything, once they have been invited to the wiki and given the wiki-wide password. This is problematic with Wikipedia, and can be illustrated by the screencast about the history of the entry on the "heavy metal umlaut." We discovered that two wiki members cannot edit the same wiki page at the same time while working on the Technology Petting Zoo wiki; later the same day, somehow, two of us got in at the same time and all the changes either one of us made had been erased! That was when we discovered the history feature. Each time a change is made and saved the wiki program saves a snapshot of the whole wiki at that moment. Training/Staff Development had a very interesting first weekend of 23 Things for just that reason. I got to help them track down and fix some of the changes later in the week, but I understand I missed the most fun! After the problems of the first week, Janis did not want to use a wiki for Wild Rumpus; I had to make an argument in favor of the wiki, and she was persuaded. Fortunately, it has worked very well, almost seamlessly, perhaps because, due to 23 Things, all involved know their way around wikis now.