What is a wiki?
I made a mistake at our last all-staff meeting and I'd like to apologize and clear it up.
There were a couple of light hearted questions that came in and I was thankful for the give and take. When I saw the question about wiki's, I mistakenly thought that it was also a gag - but it wasn't. I was disappointed in myself for not thinking longer about the question.
Most of you reading this know what a wiki is, but just in case you don't - wikipedia has as good a definition as anyone. In short, a wiki is a web site that allows people to easily edit its contents directly. Some wiki's allow anyone (who has registered with that site) to edit the material, other wiki's restrict access. The best example of a wiki where anyone can edit the web pages is wikipedia - go here and try it if you are curious. It's free, legal and in a weird kind of way, it's also fun. In ITS, we have examples of wiki's that require that potential editors login with their Penn State Access Account, and there are still other internal wiki's that limit editorial rights to certain groups that are working on a given project. One of the best examples of a wiki at Penn State is the one used in ITS Consulting and Support Services to help sustain community knowledge in a transitory work force.
Wiki's are just one tool we are trying to learn how to embrace and master to help us create discoverable knowledge, as we try to break out of the old communication modalities. Blogs, podcasts, screencasts, etc. are other tools being utilized, explored, etc.
A meta-question that I am asking myself as I try to atone for my error at the all-staff meeting, is what dynamic is missing from our internal engagements where everyone in ITS wouldn't have already heard about or been encouraged to explore wiki's? If you have any thoughts, I'm all ears.
And just as it was after the last all-staff meeting, I'd also be interested in any feedback you'd have to help us plan the next one, when it should be, etc.
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Here's a link to the SIGUCCS presentation about the ITS CSS Lab Consultant wiki.
Thank you for clarifying this technology. Sometimes when we work closely with certain technology everyday, we take for granted that we all understand the concept as well as the uses.
These new technologies used for collaboration and social networking will take time to get accustomed to. Can you remember when we were introduced to email many years ago? It took awhile for us to get used to not using the phone or face-to-face contact for communication.
Like email, I need to feel that blogs, wikis, social networking and such are tools that I can use to make my life better or more productive. On the other hand, like email, I wouldn't want these tools to require an enormous amount of time to control.
In an environment where meetings seem to be taking over most of the work day, collaboration tools may become more critical. The problem I have is getting the time to experiment using them. Hopefully, these tools will be used more as they become part of our everyday work/personal lives.
Wikis like most new tools are fun to explore and full of potential. To some they will become a valuable tool in which people come together and synergistically grow, to others a fountain of knowledge to extract. IT has an obligation to explore these options to offer people fast easy ways to achieve their goals. But the cost / benefit should be objectively weighed. People are sometimes encouraged into such a toolset that does not produce enough gain for the energy spent, along with diluting a person’s underestimated but finite ability to contribute and discover. Blogs, Wikis, Email, folder structures, tags for files, newsgroups, RSS Feeds, List Serves, databases, XML structures, where should I put my daily contribution? Certainly not all in one place, but If I scatter it to all options, you will need to look in all options to find it. How do I keep moving knowledge from one platform to another or do I abandon the old, leaving a graveyard of aging, onetime relevant data for people to sift. It could be best for a group of people to rally around a less then optimal solution for a given period of time, devoting more time and energy to make it the best Stonehenge, then move on.
I've always been on the early adopter side of the new technology adoption curve. That said, I have become a wiki fanatic, and not just because it was the latest thing to come down the 'pike.
The MAC group is currently using a very extensive wiki that acts as a collaboration whiteboard for our strategic plan, annual report and project brainstorming; a repository of project materials; a listing of work schedules and contact info for the group (we have 90% telecommuters); summaries from conferences attended; a collection of kudos for work we have done; and many more items. We continue to discover uses for our wiki.
While it took some of the MAC group a while to get the hang of using the wiki, we all agree that it has many benefits: collaboration and creativity have increased, telecommuters feel much more a part of the "office culture", information can't be "lost" in a slew of emails because it is organized and categorized in one place, the latest "version" of information is available to all, etc.
I firmly believe that the MAC group would not function as well as it does without the use of a wiki.
And, BTW, we've got the Computer Store folks also using their own, for the same reasons.
If you're interested in further examples of how wikis can help your work group, get in touch with me.
Fred Fenstermaker raises an important point, although I'd like to use it to identify intriguing opportunities.
We've left a lot of Stonehenges abandoned-in-place and receding in our wake. One could entitle a blog entry, "We've forgotten more than we know..."
The worst part is that we don't *know* what we've forgotten, nor do our legacy silos make it easy to search for things we can't identify or describe except in terms set by the silos themselves.
Plus, what works in one silo might very well not work in the next. Arcane disciplinary domains, mangled or non-existent thesauri, the occasional downright lousy user interface, and near-total non-interoperability all conspire to keep people stuck at the one or two places they feel comfortable digging for content. And we shouldn't be surprised if folks start to become numb to our suggestions to go someplace new.
Ah, opportunities! There may be ways to provide an underlying information infrastructure to begin to provide relief to those frustrated by the cycles of repeatedly building and replacing Information Stonehenges. Technology has a role to play here.
But for those who may never even have discovered just how much has already been known or forgotten at one time in the past (say five or ten years ago, or 500, or 1500), we have to turn to our teachers - and, we have to give those teachers better and better tools to achieve transparent "findability" across a landscape littered with Stonehenges, Leaning Towers, and Step Pyramids holding forgotten treasures.
I agree with Fred that the cost/benefit ratio has to be a factor. Like R, I try new technologies earlier than most people; I also abandon them in a heartbeat when I feel the benefit is less than the cost. In the case of wikis, Emerging Technologies has run a bunch of them for a number of years for various groups, and they've stood the test of time very well. If they're a passing fad, the passing is happening very, very slowly. For me, wikis are among the more useful and versatile collaboration tools currently available.