Thing 12

Thing 12 deals with Wikis, and since the Library 2.0 workshop I took last year covered wikis, I'm going to repost what I posted for that blog entry, with a few edits (I hope that's ok).

After learning about wikis this week in class, it is neat to think of all the different ways to use them. Whenever I had previously heard the term "wiki," I only thought of Wikipedia. But the list of wikis that was provided to us was pretty cool to check out in order to see the different organizations that are using wikis to share information and get people involved through editing and content contribution.

As mentioned in my discussion board post for class this week, there seem to be both positives and negatives associated with wikis. What worries me is that if you have a wiki for important information (such as a medical wiki), then anyone has the ability to edit content on the site, and who's to say that it's necessarily accurate? Though hopefully people using wikis to look up information would just use them as a starting point and then also refer to other (more reputable) sources such as reference books or hospital/organizational or health websites.

After learning about the different uses of wikis (and viewing the commoncraft how-to-wiki video), I created a wiki for my friends and I to use as a planning base for our upcoming vacation where we were able to post our flight information (since there were 2 groups of us flying in at different times), places of interest to visit, weather information, transportation links, etc. -- and it was actually lots of FUN to create this wiki! I think other possible uses of wikis could include similar things not related to library or educational organizations, such as: parents using wikis to plan things like parties for kids, sporting event banquets and fundraisers, family reunions, kids talking about their favorite books or writing fan fiction (I'm thinking Harry Potter and Twilight wikis here), workplace wikis (in which all employees could edit, among other things, content like helpful database links, websites of interest, general workplace questions), etc.