Wiki notes

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Wiki notes

Contents

To flesh out PLN's wiki cluster, this roundup includes miscellaneous notes on wikis--excluding Wikipedia as a special case--from Leader's Digest but also notes on how wikis are or could be used in libraries, from PLN and elsewhere.

Notes from Leader's Digest

by Leslie Dillon, with updates in some cases by Walt Crawford

When to use a wiki

Leader's Digest April 2007

Are you wondering when it's appropriate to use a wiki in your library? Here are some hints--adapted from an article in managesmarter from Sales & Marketing Management.

  1. To update records for team meetings. Wikis can help attendees add or correct information on meeting minutes.
  2. To facilitate communication across departments. When different teams all have to work together on documents (such as RFPs), wikis can help ease the process.
  3. If you have multiple sites. Staff from many locations can provide direct valuable input into reports.
  4. If you work with other library partners.Wikis can give multiple users access to approve or update materials.
  5. To substitute for expensive content management software. Because wikis typically use open-source software, they are usually free or inexpensive.

(managesmarter, Sales & Marketing Management, Mar.22, 2007.)

Wiki technnology

Leader's Digest March 2007

Business Week's March 12 issue had a special report on wikis. I've summarized what I thought were the major points in several articles. BW defines wikis as "fairly focused Web sites compiled and constantly edited by a dedicated group of people--all of whom can not only post material to the site but edit it at will." Examples outside of Wikipedia include the Open Guide to London, with "an extensive and ever-changing list of places to see, eat, and generally have fun." There's also the Tolkien Wiki for everything related to the Ring and TrekWiki for Star Trek fans.

Corporate teams are "using wikis as a speedy way to collaborate without having to endure endless back-and-forth e-mail exchanges or dealing with complex and expensive groupware, such as IBM's Lotus Notes" In fact, wikis "are gradually rewriting the rules of collaboration at companies as varied as Sony, Xerox, Disney, and Microsoft... [A] 'comprehensive survey of Fortune 1,000 companies...would probably find some sort of wiki in all of them,' says a Harvard Business School professor specializing in technology and management operations. Software developer Nicholas Pisarro Jr., the founder of software maker Aperture Technologies Inc., is using wikis at work. "Two dozen of the...company's 100 employees use them to brainstorm, track projects, write and edit documentation, and coordinate marketing. That has eliminated countless meetings, conference calls, and back-and-forth e-mails." Says Pisarro: "Wikis allow this collaboration much better than anything else, so we get things done faster." (Business Week, March 12, 2007.)

Update, May 5, 2008: At this writing, Open Guide to London is offline. The Tolkien Wiki is relatively opaque, but has had no changes in the last month and appears to be moribund. TrekWiki was closed in mid-2004 because of other Star Trek wikis, which makes its inclusion in a 2007 article odd. Notably, Memory Alpha, the Wikia wiki pointed to from TrekWiki, is active--on a Monday morning, 50 changes go back less than two hours--but, like most Wikia wikis, does not show pageviews.

Social software in action: Nancy Pearl's Book Lust wiki

Leader's Digest February 2007

Yesterday I had my first look at Nancy Pearl's Book Lust wiki. Have you seen it yet? If not, take a look!! It's a great example of what can be done with these new, free social networking tools.

The Book Lust wiki has reviews, favorite books, links to author sites, ideas for book clubs, ads from Google, links to Nancy Pearl's book review broadcasts--you can listen to the broadcast or read a summary--the audio is more interesting though! And it has 800 users, some of whom are adding content to the site.

Nancy Pearl's wiki is based on WetPaint, one of the new, easy-to-use, collaborative tools on the web. I've worked with earlier, traditional wikis, and found them difficult and confusing to set up and use. WetPaint, on the other hand, is amazingly simple. One reviewer called it unprecedented in its simplicity and ease of use. And it's quite robust; it has WYSIWYG editing; it has tagging; and you can add images and video. It's better than any wiki software I've seen before, in spite of a few drawbacks (e.g., no RSS capability). Here's a great review if you want to read more about WetPaint.

Other similar social networking tools include Ning (check out its bookshelf) and pbwiki, which I've tried before, but with less success than WetPaint.

It looks like wikis will soon be ready for prime time. So send your staff out to explore how they can use these tools to enhance your library's web presence! They can link to Nancy Pearl's Book Lust wiki from your library's web site, or they can experiment with setting up a book lover's wiki for your library patrons--maybe with input from the library's book group members. (Inspired by a post from Chrystie Hill on It's all good, Feb. 3, 2007.)

Update, May 5, 2008: This wiki now shows 1,600 members and is moderately active, with five edits in a one-week period. wetpaint is much less transparent than MediaWiki and adds animated, flashing ads. This wiki also has many forums with some continuing activity.

Crowdsourced novel: A Million Penguins

Leader's Digest February 2007

The crowdsourced novel A Million Penguins went live the other day "with a few first tentative chapters and a great deal of technical confusion". Part of the problem resided in the MediaWiki software (the software that Wikipedia uses) , which is known for its virtues and its vices. (PLN also uses MediaWiki software.)

But, according to John Blossom, "the content itself is doing some interesting things. It's kind of a tacky novel...but there is dialog, character development and more than a small amount of effort being put into coming up with something that just may work as a piece of literature at some point. The greatest limitation [he sees] at this point besides the technological limits of MediaWiki is the lack of vision in creating narrative fiction online. So far, it's just classic storytelling. That's not a bad thing altogether, but with hyperlinks, multimedia and open-standards functionality available it's a little like pretending that only the tones of expression available from a harpsichord matter in the era of pianos and electronic keyboards." (John Blossom, ContentBlogger, Feb. 2, 2007.)

Update, May 5, 2008: If you got here from Transparency and MediaWiki, it's worth noting that Penguin didn't hide anything and has kept the wiki live if locked. It's an impressive display of transparency, regardless of its literary merits. (Can the crowd really write a better novel than one talented individual?

First wiki book project

Leader's Digest November 2006

The MIT Collective Intelligence Laboratory is launching the first wiki book publishing project. Authors are invited to help write the first networked book about how the emergence of community and social networks will change the future rules of business. We Are Smarter Than Me has been formed to prove that the community itself can write a compelling book better than individuals. Pearson will publish the book next fall and each contributor will be listed as an author. (Paula Hane, Information Today NewsLink, Issue 85/November 2006. Paula Hane's article wasn't available on the NewsLink archive when I posted this, but in case you want to check later, the archive is here.)

Update, May 5. 2008: At this writing We Are Smarter Than Me is not a wiki. It's a website with forums, discussions and blogs--but there's no indication that collaborative editing is possible, and it doesn't use wiki software.

Internet Librarian

Leader's Digest October 2006

Here are some wiki success stories you might actually be able to use:

  • Marianne Kruppa, Library Webmaster at St. Joseph County Public Library, South Bend, IN, “has a great idea—Don’t Call It a Wiki!...Instead, call it what it is--a resource list, subject guide, etc. Marianne...also suggests a separate wiki for library staff so they can express themselves freely and have fun.”
  • Ohio University’s Chad Boeninger, who uses a wiki for research guides, believes wikis are easier to maintain than guides. It’s easy to add content to wikis, they have unlimited space, can be organized by categories, and they’re searchable.

(Information Today blog, October 26, 2006.)

Learning from failure

Alan Kirk Gray has suggested that a Library Failures Wiki would make a valuable complement to Library Sucess: A Best Practices Wiki, since we frequently learn more from failure than from success:

For many of us, it's far better to avoid a potential problem--some kind of failure--even though it means passing up the likelihood of greater success. What does that yield? Rules that cause hardship for all patrons because of the actions of a few... Could it be that complex cataloging rules and hand-crafting mean that we can find what we're looking for all the time...and we never want to fail, even if that means our patrons are missing the ease of use that Amazon gives them?
Pick the greatest peeve you have with your library and think about how it could be remedied if you were willing to bear the possibility that you might screw up when you tried to fix it. You know what, we need a Library Failures wiki more than we need a list of successful best practices. I bet we would learn more... Look around your risk-free library and see if you can't find some uncertainty to dive into.

Walt Crawford suspected that nobody would contribute to Library Failures: A Learning Experience Wiki--commendable though such a wiki would be. To experiment on a smaller scale, he started a Learning from failure page on the Library Success Wiki. In its first five weeks of existence, nobody has offered their learning experiences.

For more, see Learning from failure.

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