Wiki may mean fast, or quick, in Hawaiian but this lesson was neither for me. I followed every link and explored them with gusto! I found myself wishing over and over again that these tools had been available to me over the last 20-30 years in my secondary career as a professional volunteer. (I have been familiar with Wikipedia for some years but have never attempted to edit those pages in any way. If fact, I have always held a certain amount of skepticism about some of its content.) I had no idea that all those other wikis existed.
One of the truly exciting aspects of wikis is how user friendly they are. (Besides the costs associated with creating a website for a small organization, there is also the need for someone to have some very good programming skills in order to edit and keep it current. Not so with wikis.) The Common Craft and PB Wiki Tour videos nicely demonstrated ease of use and the possibility of time savings. Setting up a wiki to plan a conference, or other event, and for shared editing of documents just sounds almost too good to be true. I found that you can not only limit access to the wiki itself but you can also limit who actually can 'edit' on the wiki. In addition, each document edit is saved.
I have no doubt that libraries could benefit from using wikis for planning events, creating written procedures and collecting agenda items for meetings. In our current economic situation, both libraries and schools could benefit the public (and save time) by creating directories, or pathfinder wikis, for jobs and scholarships - which might require daily updates by various agencies.
I look forward to checking out www.wikimatrix.org in more depth before organizing my next event. Now to enjoy an investigation of 'Wiki Farms' vs 'DIY Wikis' with that cup of tea!
One of the truly exciting aspects of wikis is how user friendly they are. (Besides the costs associated with creating a website for a small organization, there is also the need for someone to have some very good programming skills in order to edit and keep it current. Not so with wikis.) The Common Craft and PB Wiki Tour videos nicely demonstrated ease of use and the possibility of time savings. Setting up a wiki to plan a conference, or other event, and for shared editing of documents just sounds almost too good to be true. I found that you can not only limit access to the wiki itself but you can also limit who actually can 'edit' on the wiki. In addition, each document edit is saved.
I have no doubt that libraries could benefit from using wikis for planning events, creating written procedures and collecting agenda items for meetings. In our current economic situation, both libraries and schools could benefit the public (and save time) by creating directories, or pathfinder wikis, for jobs and scholarships - which might require daily updates by various agencies.
I look forward to checking out www.wikimatrix.org in more depth before organizing my next event. Now to enjoy an investigation of 'Wiki Farms' vs 'DIY Wikis' with that cup of tea!
I was hoping those dancers would start moving when I clicked on them. What a disapointment....
ReplyDeleteThat would have been a coup. I'm reminded of the famous quote "Imagination is everything..."
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I found this picture in Wikipedia Commons. From looking through the series of these posted pictures, I can tell that they were taken at our very own Seattle Center House!