Wikis

I love wikis! My family goes on an annual ski trip/family reunion, and when I started Library school and learned html, I became the family webmaster. Email just hadn't been working very well when it came to planning our vacation with multiple people coming from multiple places. Me as webmaster was better, but it meant I had to go in and code all the changes as people emailed them to me. I was the one doing all the work, which was difficult when I was going to school while working full time and taking care of family. Plus, once I graduated we were going to have to find a new Webhost. Wikis are the best solution! I used the wikimatrix to decide that PBWiki would be the best wiki program for us. It was amazing how fast the site came together with lots of people contributing their efforts! My elderly mother even figured out how to edit a page, it is that easy. We have never had a problem with malicious editing, but our group is small, and I assume no one is interested enough in our little wiki to find it.

Relating wikis to libraries, I thought it was interesting that the example link to the Princeton Public library wiki hadn't been updated since 2006. Evidently it was used for a summer reading program where adults could post reviews of books they read to the wiki, but since that time they post directly to the library website. One way that our library has discussed using a wiki is as a readers advisory tool for putting together good bibliographies for various interests. Like my family's wiki use, it would involve only a small group of participants rather than be open to the general public.

Speaking to this wider issue of audience size, it seems like small groups that know each other are good candidates for wikis. This can even be enforced by making them officially private with password entry for editing. Huge wikis also seem to work, such as wikipedia. Enough people are interested enough to keep on top of any changes and change anything malicious. I wonder if medium sized groups such as the patrons of a particular library system are too annonymous for social checks, yet too small for enough people to keep track of changes. If you have a moderator, doesn't that just negate the benefits of wikis?