Common Craft: Wikis in Plain English
What is a wiki?
A wiki is a bunch of web pages that anyone can edit freely. You don’t need to be tech savvy to edit and change a wiki. The best known wiki is wikipedia. With Wikipedia anyone can get an account and delete, add or change the information. Wikis have links, and people can add and delete freely.
Have you ever heard of the read/write web? The term means that users can interact with what they are reading creating an atmosphere of collaboration and community. Wikis involve, engage and facilitate collaboration among the people who use them.
- The Montana State Historical Society put together a wiki on the history of Montana to allow users to easily quick in a hyperlinked set of articles: Montana History Wiki: Fur Trade
- Here is the Every Child Ready to Read wiki which hosts a set of best practices: Every Child Read to Read @ your library wiki
- Library Success Wiki
Why do I need to know what a wiki is?
Wikis are perfect for collaboration with committees. They allow for everyone to have a voice, and they allow for asynchronous communication. You can easily edit sets of best practices and easily work with shared documentation. They are effortless to use for collaborating and knowledge sharing.
- Seven Things You Should Know About Wikis by Educause
- Wiki 101 by Paul Bernard
- Wiki Overview Powerpoint from ala.org
The Parts of a Wiki
Add a New Page: this button allows you to add a new page to a wiki and when you click on it will open up a window where you can edit how the page will look. You can choose to do this in the editor you see (called a What You See Is What You Get editor WYSIWYG), or you can edit it in HTML.
WYSIWYG Editors: Scary acronym! It means "What You See Is What You Get". It’s an editor like when you open up Word. You type, and can choose bold, italics, underline, just like in a typing program.
Edit Page: If you click on Edit on the top of any wiki page you have access to you can change the information on the page. Play with this! Click around and add or delete! Have some fun! Then hit….
Save: The save button is very important and is on a different part of the page depeding on the brand of wiki you are using, usually at the top or the bottom of the page. When you hit the save button
Revision Comparison: This is a feature that will show you a list of all the edits made to a wiki. That’s why you can’t "break it" because any wiki user can always look at the recent changes. You can revert to old versions, or look to see what edits someone made.
Show all pages: Clicking on this button will show you an alphabetical list of all of the pages within the wiki.
Files and attachments: You can upload a file for others to view. There tends to be a file size limit. This is really helpful if a group is collaborating for a manual or knowledge-base.
Preview: Some wiki brands offer you to preview the page. You’ll have to save it to accept the edits you’ve made, or hit cancel to go back and make more changes.
Class Resources
You can compare and contrast types of wikis at http://www.wikimatrix.org Try these brands of wiki software:
Class Assignment
The best way to learn about wikis is to play with them, and have fun. Play, play & more play. You can’t break it. So I set something up for you to use! I created a wiki called My Town, Idaho. You can access it here: Idaho Towns http://idahotowns.pbwiki.com/
The password is: idaho
Enter your name, your email address, and click or unclick to be notified of changes.
Please add a link to the town that you live in, if one doesn’t already exist, and tell us about some good restaurants, libraries, parks, or cool places to visit. You don’t need to sign in. Just click "Edit" and add a page for your town in the right side bar where it says "Insert a link to a new page" or… Navigate to your town by clicking on the name, and then click "Edit" and when you’re done either way click "Save"
Email me with questions! [email protected]
Comment and discuss below!
Extra Credit
Using the Professional Development Service you can check out one of these two books by sending in the information on this form and the book will be mailed to you! Be sure to get a library card for this awesome service! Here are the two books:
- wikipatterns : a practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization by Stewart Mader 004.6 MADER 2008
- Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals by Ellyssa Kroski 020 Kroski 2008
Well, I’m chiming in awfully late, but I had fun adding to Amy’s wiki: first, I added a blurb about the Shakespeare Festival; then I noticed the Library section for Boise was EMPTY (!) so I added the Hillside JHS library to that section.
I created a practice wiki for Hillside faculty members last year, and then discovered that only I could get to it, because of my special library hole-in-the-firewall. ALL blogs and wikis are blocked by the Boise School District!! This must change soon. Arrggh.
As a member of the School Library Task Force, I have had a chance to collaboratively work on this wiki with a wonderful group of professionals. Please take a look and post your ideas and input about the new Draft Idaho ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Standards.
http://idahoict.pbwiki.com/
This is fun!! I added my town–Coeur d’Alene, and wrote a few lines about the school and lovely Lake Coeur d’Alene. I chose a font and font size–just trying to get the hang of writing in it!! It’d be neat to keep adding to it: insert pics, etc!!
Sorry, couldn’t resist. It is a good thing especially if you like giving your input and embellishing the simple facts. More info is better I say, painting a picture with words, love it. Have a great day.
Hadn’t explored these much before, although wikipedia is a great source for Series books in order;look up the author and the lists are extensive. I read & added to idahotowns. I’m with Greg on the school filters…it makes all of this much more difficult or even impossible. Boo Hoo!
Wikis were in that “I know it’s a great tool and I’ll have to try it someday” category for me. Thanks for getting me over that hurdle…was way too easy for all that angst!
I’ve finally experienced adding to the wiki! Thanks to the SPLAT team I’m gaining ground in computer knowledge.
This was a fun and useful assignment to do. I was somewhat familiar with wiki’s but I had never added anything to one before. It was fun and easy to do. I will probably use wiki’s again.
I didn’t have much time to explore the Wiki software presented but I did manage to edit the ‘towns’ wiki. Thank you for setting it up for us to edit. This was a great way to experience the real thing. I look forward to getting back to this application.
Thanks, Amy. I have used PBwiki before but don’t spend much time exploring its new features, so I added a couple Google Gadgets on the Hailey page I created. (If you edit your page and click on Insert Plugin then Productivity, you’ll see ‘add Google Gadget’) Had a little trouble with the weather gadget – it kept defaulting back to New York! Finally I looked at the code and changed a couple things and then it worked. I liked the compare/contrast page you referred us to! Also I found a couple other wiki creators from your list that aren’t filtered in our district: JotSpot and Social Text. Yea! Thanks again…
Hi Amy: This was an easy session and I did get a page started. The one problem was the link and I do not have a globe anywhere and couldn’t figure out how to set that part up. Any suggestions……….Thanks Barbara
I enjoyed this class, even tho I already use the wiki
I’ve used wikis before as part of group assignments in my online studies. I’ve never really thought about using them for committees at the library though. That would really help keep us organized when we are planning programs or events.
This was fun! It’ll be interesting to see how I can implement this here at school with our super-stong, sensitive filters! Thanks for the lessons!
I was glad to learn about Wikis today.
Great comments everybody! Keep at it! Ezekiel gets points for trying! And if anyone else gets that error, be patient, I guess, or email me!
Thanks all!
I can see so many possibilities with Wiki’s. Now I’ve just got to find a great wiki to follow or add too. (Besides this one of course) How do I find Wikis on topics that are of interest to me?
I ended up putting the photos on a flash drive and loading it from there. It worked just fine.
I added my comment to my co-worker’s page. I am quite familiar with pbwiki as we have been using it for several years.
I like easy!
Try this one: http://www.qwika.com/
Thanks for adding Pierce! I’m glad you had a good time with it!
That’s pretty neat! I’m glad you can see an immediate use! Go wikis!
Definitely easy. This used all the same skills as the previous blogging lesson, so it was fun to build off of those. I love the way that PBWiki makes it easy to insert links, autoformatting the URL as needed.
I can see where this could be a very useful tool. I am also from Rexburg, so we could use it to coordinate activities throughout our library district. I’m at Archer Elementary, so this will be the last year here, but we will have a new school with a new library to put together.
Hi Amy,
Thanks for a good wiki lesson. Fortunately, I have had some experience cause we have a wiki at our library. Our staff uses it to plan programs and give input about organizing work areas. I think it is pretty easy to use.
Thanks
Nice easy format to work with! I put in text and links, but couldn’t figure out how to upload an image. I browsed and selected one, but it wouldn’t give me the upload button. Does the image have to be in a particular place? Flickr? the desktop?
Hey! That was fun! Pierce wasn’t listed in the town list, so I added it and put in a page. Very easy….
I have added some information on Meridaian Library District and our expansion in March of 2009.There will be a branch at Silverstone, south of I84 at Eagle and Overland. I can find the page when I search for it but I was expecting it to be tied to the Meridian page. Should I have done it differently?
I see a great benifit for students collaborating on projects, and maybe would use a wiki for planning SRP with others.
Check out the Wiki page my son composed about the school where he teaches in South Korea!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimhae_Foreign_Language_High_School
I have enjoyed using PBWiki as a publishing page for students that were in a Creative Writing Club I had. It would be a great place to start posting my “LITs” (Librarians in Training), as we call our student aides, book reviews!!
Wikis are a lot of fun. I’ve never used one before, but they are really easy. I will definitely add to our own when we get it back up and running.