Communicating Online: Wikis
Author content collaboratively with wikis.
A wiki is a useful environment to collaborate openly, and develop a knowledge base for instance with authorship being as wide as the owner/administrator determines.
With a more open approach to authorship, the content of a wiki can change constantly as it benefits directly from the insight and specialist knowledge of a large group of potential authors.
Changes to wikis can be tracked and archiving of content is possible.
Why and when to use a Wiki
Use wikis for sharing information and creating communities of interest.
They have all sorts of uses, from a discussion medium to a repository of information, from a mail system to a tool for collaboration and can incorporate words, pictures, videos, and audio clips. They can also be used to advertise events and news.
They're a powerful tool because they constantly evolve and are great collaborative spaces. They can open to the world or to subscribers / invitees only.
Consider your aims before you set up the wiki:
- What's the topic?
- Who can be a member?
- Are you using it to inform or to create a community – or both…
- Can everyone see or only some edit, or are you going to restrict membership and let everyone contribute?
Used as educational tools, wikis have the potential to:
- Create networks of meaning and communities of interest
- Enable distributed learning across the Internet
- Facilitate collaborative learning – enabling participants to engage in discussion, learning and information exchange not easily achieved face to face…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY – Wikis in Plain English
Contributing to a Wiki
Contributing to a Wiki is straightforward but not as simple as publishing a post in a blog.
Page creation and editing is done on the Web using simple mark up language.
Wikis make considerable use of internal linking, allowing easy associations between different content pages.
The mark-up is far easier than html; its complexity is restricted in order to encourage contribution.