Wikis

What is a wiki?
Loosely defined, a wiki is an online collaborative workspace that allows users to add, remove and edit content. The term "wiki" is the Hawaiian phrase word for "quick" or "fast" and this is one of the inherent benefits of a wiki. One of the best known and most used wikis is Wikipedia, the online open-community encyclopedia. Wikis are perfect for environments in which large amounts of information need to be shared among many people, quickly. Units of information in wikis are commonly called "articles."

Confusion often arises regarding the difference between a blog and a wiki. The easiest way to remember the distinction is to associate the following adjectives with each: blog=chronological; wiki=collaborative. As you already know from Week 1, a blog is like an online journal in which posts are displayed in reverse chronological order. A blog owner or few owners are responsible for creating the main content of a blog. The owner(s) commonly allow others to post comments after blog entries, so there is some interactivity/participation from those who are viewing the content. On the other hand, a wiki is designed to share the duty of creating all of the content for the web site, whatever its purpose. It is fully interactive and collaborative.

Some of the benefits of wikis:

• Anyone (registered or unregistered if unrestricted) can add, edit or delete content.
• Tracking tools allow you to easily keep up on what been changed and by whom.
• Earlier versions of a page can be rolled back and viewed when needed.
• Users do not need to know HTML in order to apply styles to text or add and edit content.

Here's a short, funny video called "Wikis in Plain English" by CommonCraft (http://www.commoncraft.com/) that discusses the merits of using a wiki versus email communication:

While the wiki "used" in this video does not look exactly like MediaWiki, which we'll be playing with below, it provides a good overview of the benefits of using wikis.

What is a wiki used for?
Wikis can serve a number of purposes, professional and personal. Nina has used them from tasks as varied as managing editorial workflow for professional library journals to looking for an apartment for her mother-in-law. Marical uses Wetpaint for collaborating with her Front Range trainers group. And, as you Aurarians already know, we've recently moved our Library intranet to a MediaWiki wiki.

Libraries all over the country have begun to use wikis to collaborate and share knowledge. Among their applications are pathfinder or subject guide wikis, book review wikis, ALA conference wikis, staff handbook wikis, and library best practices wikis. As you can will see when you view the wikis in the list below, the content of a wiki depends on the knowledge and commitment of participants.

Here are a few examples of how other libraries are using wikis:
SJCPL Subject Guides – a pathfinder wiki developed by the St. Joseph County Public Library system.
Book Lovers Wiki - developed by the Princeton Public Library.
Library Success: A best practices wiki
The Albany County Public Library Staff wiki – an example of a wiki created for library staff to document procedures.
Library Bloggers Wiki



How to add, edit or remove content from a Wiki
Now that you know what wikis are and how they can be used as powerful collaboration tools, let's look at how to use them. Wikis use a special markup language called wikitext, which bears some resemblance to HTML. Before you proceed to the activity, take a look at what wikitext markup looks like here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext_examples

So, now it's time to create a wiki page! There are two options, the first one for UCD employees (both campuses) and the second for non-UCD employees:

Auraria/UCD employees:

1. Go to the Library wiki (link will open in a new window so that you can view that page and the instructions on this page simultaneously), http://intranet.auraria.edu/wiki/ 2. When prompted, sign on using your UCD network credentials--the user ID and password that you use to log on to your computer every morning.
3. Click on the "Intranet Wiki Training Area" link and follow the instructions to create a page on the wiki. It can be "your" page just for fun--hobby, special interest, etc.--or if you have a procedure or some sort of documentation that you'd like to post, feel free to work on that.
4. Use wikitext to create some simple formatting, like a bulleted or numbered list, a header, a link to another document inside or outside of the wiki, etc. You can also experiment with the Rich TextEditor options by clicking on the links near the top of the page; they provide a more Microsoft Word look and feel, which makes formatting easier if you're not familiar with wikitext.
5. Save your page and note the URL in the address bar. Copy the URL into your blog post for this week.

Non-UCD Folks:

1. Go to the MediaWiki.org sandbox site http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Sandbox
(link will open in a new window so that you can view that page and the instructions on this page simultaneously) 2. Play! :) Click on "Edit" and enter some text and experiment with wikitext formatting.
3. Create a page about a hobby or special interest, a personal page, whatever strikes your fancy.
4. Use wikitext to create some simple formatting, like a bulleted or numbered list, a header, a link to another document inside or outside of the wiki, etc.
5. Since this is a public sandbox area, you won't be able to save the content of your page with a URL. In your blog post, you can simply talk about the experience of creating a wiki page.

Don't worry about breaking anything; you can't, and wikis are generally intended to be works in progress anyway.

Troubleshooting and CHALLENGE (optional)

1. If you are having trouble adding basic content or want to explore more advanced editing options click here. You will find specific help for MediaWiki here.
2. Have you used another wiki site that offers free hosting (i.e. you do not need to have your own server) such as PBwiki or Wetpaint? If so, compare them to MediaWiki (incidentally, Wikipedia also uses MediaWiki) and share your observations on your blog.
3. If you did not already do this in your blog post for this Thing, generate several ideas for how you might use a wiki both personally and professionally and share these ideas in your blog.

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