A person’s view of human nature, and specifically the nature of the users of a wiki, directly affects whether that person sees the wiki as being bound for anarchy, utopia, or fated to oscillate somewhere in between.—Blake, Peter. Using a wiki for information services: principles and practicalities.
I'm an oscillator. I think wikis are a great idea in some circumstances, particularly for information sharing internally. I was thinking that translating our procedures manual to a wiki would be a great idea, and started reading Peter's article accordingly. Partway through and it's all sounding like various debates I've been hearing about what to do with the intranet, how to control access and keep it up-to-date and that sort of thing. Maybe there would be turf wars about who was allowed to update the procedures, arguments over so-and-so getting the procedure wrong, entries deleted altogether in a fit of pique, new slanderous ones being put up in retaliation...it could all become quite soap-operatic!
The cynical part of me thinks that if we started up a wiki procedure manual, it would soon devolve into the kind of infrequently-updated and even more infrequently-used mess that our current PDFed version on the intranet already is, and nothing much would happen at all—good or bad.
On the other hand, the e-help pages we run are pretty frequently used. So maybe the larger question is: is it worth translating something that already works reasonably well in its existing form into a new form that might be more work to update and possibly get corrupted by inaccurate information? Especially when we've already got an entire slv21 project devoted to finding new solutions for these and other organisational issues?
Hmmm. The pondering continues.
As far as the library wikis I looked at goes, they mostly seem to suffer from the issue of people being insufficiently interested in some areas and incredibly interested in others. Also, a wiki that consists of a lot of links has little to distinguish it from a delicious account, and I have to wonder why one would bother setting up a wiki if one wasn't going to actually provide, you know, content. Crazy, I know.
In other news, I have come to the realisation that starting up this blog has given me an entirely new online identity: a ranter. I am far more optimistic in real life, but there is something about the medium of the blog that just inspires my inner rantiness.
4 comments:
anything online, someone has to take responsibility. A wiki in theory is a great way of sharing knowledge, but who is actually responsible for it.
Opps...I beat the network with my keying in...(does that tell you anything??) The message above has missed the first word "Like"
Anarchy-----Utopia, now THERE'S an interesting continuum. I would have put them both towards the same end of the scale ;)
Just checking that the login is working given it didn't 5 minutes ago,with a witness
Post a Comment