Task 15 - What's in a Wiki & Task 16 - Wiki Collaboration

Wikis are excellent collaborative tools and a great way to avoid flooding email accounts with "conversational" exchanges. However, the desire to collaborate must exist for a successful wiki (you only have to look at Wikipedia to see this) - simply building it and hoping they will come wont work. If there is one problem with wikis being used to foster collaboration it is that people have to be interested enough to visit the wiki and this is where the targeted nature of email has the advantage.

Regarding Wikipedia, a recent Inside Higher Ed article http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/14/encyclopedias stated that "From a business standpoint, the most attractive aspect of Wikipedia might be the fact that unpaid volunteers create and edit most of the content. But to consumers, the site’s greatest draw, aside from being cost-free, is probably its breadth." I don't believe that users are draw to Wikipedia necessarily because it is updated and written by peers, they use it because:

• it is free,
  
• easy to use,
  
• will almost unfailingly offer them some kind of answer to their question (whatever that question might be) and
  
• in the library environment much more visible than the many password protected e-reference resources on offer.