#17 wiki encore

Have dutifully added my humble blog to the list of favourites.

Poked around a little bit more. I can see a lot of ways that having a wiki could be really useful—group assignments or tasks, for example, particularly if you set up the structure so that different people have the main responsibility for fleshing out the content for particular areas.

I think I remember my brother sending me a link to a wiki that was a reference tool for a fictional world, with entries on geography and history and politics and everything, all according to the interest of those who got involved. Although very geeky (my brother is a geek) it's also kind of neat.

It could work for book reviews (as one of the sites linked to in the other post showed; I actually liked that one). It could work as a way of managing user-generated input, although I'm not clear as to whether the software or functionality could be embedded as a component of a larger site. It does have a lot of possibilities, and if it's an add-on instead of the main focus of something you do, then it's not so important if nobody contributes, or does so erratically.

Basically, a wiki seems like a good collaborative tool—whether it's a collaboration of equals (roughly) or whether it's a secondary contribution.

I do find it mildly discouraging to have to learn an entirely new way of adding content (despite PBWiki's claim that it's as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich and requires little training and coding, it seems more complicated to me). It's a useful reminder that those without a basic grasp of html (mine is pretty basic, but fortunately I do have one) must find blogging and wikis and lots of other things more intimidating, which no doubt contributes to the WYSIWYG-induced popularity of, say, blogger vs other journalling software like livejournal, which does require more in the way of html if you want formatting.

The other thing that occurs to me (rather belatedly, and it's a bit of a chestnut) is that all these collaborative social networking technology tools are all very well and good if you have a computer and reliable internet access, but if you don't, you're pretty much stuck up the proverbial without the proverbial. I know that historically, new technological developments (oooh, paper! oooh, movable type!) have always created an initial division between those who had them and those who didn't before becoming more widespread. But I do think we need to maintain our awareness that not everyone wants to use these technological tools and not everyone who wants to use them has the ability to. I have already written longer than I meant to, so will not go into this more at the moment, but the library's role as intermediary and obligation to be all things to all people is certainly worth pondering.

Maybe in my free time.