If you’ve read the posts on blogs and RSS aggregators, perhaps you are now wondering what the difference between a blog and a wiki is. Hopefully, this blog post will help you out.
A blog is like a diary or a journal. It’s updates on a regular basis (or not so regular basis) and each update gets its own entry, but the older content doesn’t change. Imagine a journal/diary hosted online and you’ve got the idea.
For a wiki, imagine a document being edited by more than one person. Each time someone edits the document, the document changes. The old content is gone and replaced by the new content.
For example, I’m writing a recipe for macaroni and cheese. I’ve posted it online in wiki. You see my recipe and think What kind of crazy person puts canned tomatoes in her mac & cheese?! She must be from outer space. Disgusted, you edit the recipe and remove the canned tomatoes. You add in broccoli and ham, which is how your mother always made mac & cheese. Now the recipe online is yours with the ham and broccoli. My friend Sarah sees the new mac & cheese recipe and wonders about your sanity for including broccoli and ham. According to Sarah, everyone knows that mac & cheese should be made with hot dogs and you should put Saltine cracker crumbs on top. She edits the recipe and now her recipe with hot dogs and crackers is online. Canned tomatoes are gone. Broccoli and ham are gone. It is like those versions never existed and Sarah’s is the only recipe there. Bill is a bit of a food snob. He sees the recipe and appalled at the hot dogs. And the cheddar cheese. Bill makes his mac & cheese with goat cheese and thyme. He edits the recipe and now his is the official version. Carol is a prankster. She replaces Bill’s recipe with a mac & cheese recipe involving cat pee and oreos. Carol’s is now official until I look back at my recipe and think yuck and return it to the version with tomatoes and cheddar cheese.
This is essential how Wikipedia or any other wiki works. You can see the disadvantages in the example above, but there are some big advantages too. A mistake in the World Book Encyclopedia won’t be fixed until the next edition is out. A mistake on Wikipedia is fixed as soon as a person who recognizes the mistake can fix it. Perhaps an expert on Marie Antoinette’s fashion wrote the Maria Antoinette article. When an expert on the politics of the French Revolution happens upons the article, that expert doesn’t delete the old information, but fleshes it out with their expertise. As this happens repeatedly, you can get a really well rounded article on Maria Antoinette. Or you can get Carol the prankster with her cat pee and Oreos article.
Again, I’m going to rely on the lovely folks at Common Craft for a video.
Wikis can be set up so that only invited guests can edit the content or open so that anyone can edit the content. They are a wonderful way to include ideas and information from a wide variety of people and keep all the information in one centralized location. Durham County Library uses a wiki to keep track of our strategic plan. While we were developing the strategic plan, we used the wiki a place to hold all the wonderful ideas staff and the public had about making Durham County Library better. Now, the wiki is used to keep track of our progress. All the strategic planning goals and objectives are on the wiki, along with the names of staff members responsible for making sure the plan gets done and not just ignored. Everyone in the world can see our progress (you can too–check out www.dclstrategicplan.pbwiki.com). The wiki allows Durham County Library to be transparent and open with its governance, which is always nice in governmental agencies.
There are downsides to a wiki–mostly pranksters. If your wiki is completly open, you open yourself up to the widest possible cache of ideas. You also open yourself up to the pranksters who put false, obnoxious, or otherwise unwanted and irrelevent information on your wiki. I’ll talk a little more about this in my next posting, which will be on Wikipedia specifically.
In the meantime, try out some wikis. Go to Wikipedia.org or check out Durham County Library’s wiki. Rochester, New York has a great wiki with information on what’s happening in Rochester at Rocwiki. And, if you like romance novels, a romance wiki is in development. These different wikis will give you a sense of what a wiki can do and when they are useful.
–Jennifer
