# 18 Wikis

I have been wanting to learn about wikis for awhile and I spent a lot of time on this topic. A wiki allows you to set up a website and invite people to contribute, edit and remove content. I love the fact that you don't need to know HTML and it is so user friendly. I can see that in instances where you need tight control it may not be as useful and you would have to set up the wiki permissions as very protected; but unfortunately this costs $5 a month with wikispaces.

"A wiki is a quick-to-build", easy to edit website on which all information can be edited, changed, or rewritten by the users or members of the stie. It is an incredibly useful tool for colloaborative writing, pooling knowledge or exchanging ideas, especially on a subject that changes or needs updating frequently." (http://plcmccore.blogspot.com/2006/04/wiki-wiki-wiki.html

I found the slideshow by Creative Commons to be very helpful. In this clip they used the example of four people wanting to go on a camping trip and it showed how they could all click on "Edit" and "Save" to contribute to the wiki. By using the "Link" tab you are able to add another page. The narrator commented that wikis were the new way of compiling information amongst people rather than everyone having messy emails in all of their inboxes.

The advantages of a wiki is that they are simple to use and flexible. They allow people to collaborate and they enable you to build knowledge of a topic from more than one person.The disadvantages are that they aren't always free and could be open to abuse or become disorganised.

I was so impressed with the potential of wikis, that I set up one for my school library and have started to add information for the Year 9 Rice Program. I have then invited a colleague to join my wiki and he can then see what sites I have collected about Hinchinbrook Island. I am hoping to share this wiki with my students and as they find good sites for their individual research focus, they will be able to add more links to the wiki.

I am really excited about their potential.

Having said this, I do feel some of these web 2 tools overlap. For instance, Google Docs also enables documents to be shared and edited,LibraryThing and Shelfari are very similar and LibGuides and a wiki seem to have similarites. However, I have not had the time to master LibGuides and I found the interface of the wiki much easier to use.