#16 Wikis

Wikis seem to be interesting tools for sharing information, and allowing others to share their information as well. They’d be useful for student groups working on group assignments/projects and could be useful for use in libraries. I had a look at some of the library wikis linked from the learning 2.0 exercise and found how they can be useful, and I can see how it would be useful for our library to adopt some of the ideas. I particularly like the book lovers wiki which allowed people to review books. If our library did this, I’d probably write reviews for it myself, as well as read other people’s reviews.

Currently our library is involved in creating a wiki – Wikinorthia – which should be up and running soon, and will involve three different library services and include local information which can be added to by anyone in the community.

A good example of the usefulness of wikis was on Saturday night when the election was being counted. Soon after the result was known, wikipedia entries for John Howard and Kevin Rudd were updated to include the events of the evening. Someone out there had nothing better to do than update wikipedia entries late on a Saturday night… though, I guess I didn’t have much better to do either since I was checking to see how quickly it would be updated….