My thoughts on wikis

Well, I must admit I don't have a lot of experience working with wikis. I am on the CAPL executive and we did create a wiki using MediaWiki as a way of gathering together numerous articles that would be relevant to public libraries. It worked fine, but really was not the best product for what we needed. After a couple of years, we moved the site to WordPress, which does work better as a central information resource -- the site is Public Libraries Building Capacity and is at www.clatoolbox.ca/caplblog if you want to take a look.

As a tool for working collaboratively on a project or for bringing things together that you want to all access, I think that wikis can work well. I agree, though, with other comments people have made about knowing which tool to use for which job. When do you use a wiki? When do you use a blog? When do you use Google Docs? I'm still not sure about it. The 23 Things wiki child page on the benefits of using wikis is really like a blog, with comments and replies -- does a wiki make sense for that?

Lots of ramblings, not a lot of answers.

Google Docs

Well, gotta say I'm not convinced about google docs. I found a couple of things frustrating, one was the fact that curser would show up before the letter that you had most recently typed rather than after --- that was confusing, I thought. The other thing I didn't like, and perhaps it's because I hadn't set it up properly, but the space in which I could type was only about four or five lines, then there was all this white space below. Did I do something wrong?

Anyway and irregardless, I think that tools like google docs are great, especially from a collaboration perspective. At the moment I am using dropbox, which is really a storage site, but also has the capability of sharing files or folders -- I'm definitely liking it and find it very useful.

"The first requisite of success is the
ability to apply your physical and
mental energies to one problem
without growing weary."
- Thomas Edison