- Thing 17: Explore and contribute to a wiki
- Thing 18: Discover Wikipedia
Now that I’ve started thinking about it I have created and contributed to quite a few wikis over the past few years.
As a member of the Bodleian Libraries web 2.0 working party I have been an active member of the Social OULS wiki. Taking part in both the Library Day in the Life and Library Routes projects also required work with wikis in order to provide links to my blog posts on the subject.
I began exploring wikis a couple of years ago when I was asked to create a site which could act as a discussion forum and set of FAQs. For this I used wikidot which gave me much more options for customisation that I had found with any other free wiki sites. Unfortunately all my hard work came to nothing as the site never got off the ground. The work I put into it though prepared me well for the task of setting up a new forum for the Business Librarians Association (BLA) which was my first task as Web Officer for the group.
I have been using PBworks a lot lately as it seems to me to be the simplest, cleanest and most reliable of the free wiki sites out there. Most recently I used PBworks to create a wiki for the Oxford Chartership Group. It is just a simple site to allow the members of the group to share their experiences of the chartership process outside of the termly lunchtime meetings.
And so what of Wikipedia? I use it a lot when I’m trying to find out basic information about a topic. I often use it as a starting point to give me an idea of where I need to go next or what other areas said topic might relate to. I mostly use it to find out random facts about things rather than for any serious research (not that I do much of that any more).
A fellow 23 Things participant scoffed at the inclusion of Wikipedia as a thing because she couldn’t imagine that there was anyone who doesn’t use it. I left a comment on her blog to the effect that it wasn’t about whether people used Wikipedia, it was about how they used it. I certainly have never edited anything or even looked much into the version history of an article. I have not found anything suitable that I can edit yet but I fully intend to do so as part of thing 18.
