Older than the IRS but young at heart
What We Need to Know About Wikis
I talked to Jenny Levine, our Wiki expert at ALA, about developments in providing and promoting wikis to the association. At RUSA, we have a number of wikis under development and as they "blossom" I add a link to each wiki to the ALA ReadWriteConnect lisiting of wikis. When enough wikis are ready for greater exposure, I'll put a page together on the RUSA site as well. But it makes little sense to make known the existence of a wiki where there is no work being done. I leave it to appropriate RUSA committees to establish guidelines and policies regarding wikis, but will use this article to make some suggestions and provide links for further understanding.
First of all, ALA has begun an excellent wiki on wikis explaining what they are and how to use them, as well as suggesting what ALA staff needs to know in order to get one started for you. It also includes best practice suggestions and tips for handling your wiki. ALA has really ramped up support for these wonderful collaborative tools! What's most important to understand, as Jenny wrote me, "Almost anything can be changed in a wiki's infrastructure at a moment's notice, as evidenced by the fact that you can suddenly turn on uploading, install a plugin to display RSS feeds, etc." But she went on to state that "the bigger issue is probably going to be structure. If you set up a wiki's structure to be chronological (which just means you manually organize entries on the home page and page titles by date) and then you decide to change to an alphabetical framework, you have to manually change the organization of the home page and possibly the page titles. Technically it's easy enough to do that (just "move" pages to new names and retype the entries on the home page), but it will be time-intensive. That's why it's a good idea to talk through the structure ahead of time and think about where you want be a year from now."
(Jenny gave me some great examples from her experience with ALA wikis, but I hesitate to steal what could be the basis of a good blog article from her on this topic!)
The biggest concern I have expressed is about the multitude of "plug-ins" and "extensions" that are appearing for use with wikis that practically turn them into sophisticated interactive Web sites. MediaWiki provides a great source of information on these extensions that should be consulted before considering what the structure and scope of your wiki will take. (A look at the Categories page provides an at-a-glance look at what can be done, which includes chat, forums (bulletin boards), RSS, Google, Firefox, and other applications.)
And, of course, every wiki that I help set up for RUSA or ASCLA will reference the MediaWiki Handbook that provides comprehensive help in working with wikis.
As always, I welcome questions and comments!
First of all, ALA has begun an excellent wiki on wikis explaining what they are and how to use them, as well as suggesting what ALA staff needs to know in order to get one started for you. It also includes best practice suggestions and tips for handling your wiki. ALA has really ramped up support for these wonderful collaborative tools! What's most important to understand, as Jenny wrote me, "Almost anything can be changed in a wiki's infrastructure at a moment's notice, as evidenced by the fact that you can suddenly turn on uploading, install a plugin to display RSS feeds, etc." But she went on to state that "the bigger issue is probably going to be structure. If you set up a wiki's structure to be chronological (which just means you manually organize entries on the home page and page titles by date) and then you decide to change to an alphabetical framework, you have to manually change the organization of the home page and possibly the page titles. Technically it's easy enough to do that (just "move" pages to new names and retype the entries on the home page), but it will be time-intensive. That's why it's a good idea to talk through the structure ahead of time and think about where you want be a year from now."
(Jenny gave me some great examples from her experience with ALA wikis, but I hesitate to steal what could be the basis of a good blog article from her on this topic!)
The biggest concern I have expressed is about the multitude of "plug-ins" and "extensions" that are appearing for use with wikis that practically turn them into sophisticated interactive Web sites. MediaWiki provides a great source of information on these extensions that should be consulted before considering what the structure and scope of your wiki will take. (A look at the Categories page provides an at-a-glance look at what can be done, which includes chat, forums (bulletin boards), RSS, Google, Firefox, and other applications.)
And, of course, every wiki that I help set up for RUSA or ASCLA will reference the MediaWiki Handbook that provides comprehensive help in working with wikis.
As always, I welcome questions and comments!
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