Week Two

I'd never used wetpaint before this week (I've always used wikispaces), and I'd never created a wiki of my own. I know how useful they can be for collaboration though, so I was excited to try it out. Wetpaint made it easy to click through the wiki creation process. I decided to create my wiki as a home for interesting websites, blogs and other wikis I've found while taking this course. I gave it a simple, easy (for me) to remember name using my initials: http://kfrmla.wetpaint.com/.

While I was in the middle of adding my wiki to the list of class wikis, someone had submitted his/her change right before me. I had to 'manually merge' my changes with his/her's. It was an impromptu, but important, lesson in wiki editing.

Discussion Points
Step 1
The library where I work uses a wiki. We use it as a document repository, as a shared place to record work processes, and for internal communication (ex. advertising and signing up for work events). It is also used to manage projects that have team members contributing from multiple library branches.

Step 3
I find this to be very true. My workplace wiki would quickly become irrelevant without everyone making contributions and keeping the content they submitted up to date. The wiki also lets us catch and fix any mistakes and dated material we find.

The student association I'm a member of uses our wiki to record meeting minutes, advertise upcoming events, and get opinions from our members. I've helped contribute to both of these wikis. However it doesn't get a lot of use because only the officers really contribute to it. With only a handful of people adding content, it isn't being utilized to its full potential.

Step 4
I joined the 'Baking Wiki' and contributed a recipe I have for 'raw cheesecake'. I know people use wikis for purposes outside of academia, but this is the first time I've done so personally.

Step 7
Blogs make it easy to track the history of a shared conversation using 'comments'. Using RSS technology, it is easier to use blogs to keep up to date with new content. While blogs are better for fostering group conversation, it is much harder to create a collaborative work using blogs. While blogs can have multiple contributors, most of the time these contributors have to be added by one or two main 'administrators'. Wikis don't have this restriction. They make it easy for many people to edit the same document. All of a blogs contributors could collaborate on the same blog post, but it would get confusing to track the development of the document. In a wiki, all edits are logged so that everyone involved in the process can quickly see who made what changes.

Wikis are also closer to being like websites than blogs are. Wikis allow users to create subsidiary pages which can be linked from the main wiki page and vise versa. For example in my wiki, I created separate pages for 'blogs', 'wikis', and 'websites'. While blogs could create separate posts where people could comment with additions (or edit the posts by contributing), the information would not be as well organized.