Ah ... wiki ... we love the word but there's a little less love for the technology. Of course I can only speak of my own experiences with wikis over the years. It may be my own fault, my own inability to demonstrate the usefulness of the wiki for any sort of group activity. I think LS&IT is using wikis successfully for projects and documentation, but the ones I've created for working groups haven't really caught on.
I took the 1/2 day course on how to use the UofS wiki a couple of years ago. I consider the system to be "powerful" but that really just means it's complicated. The biggest barrier seems to be getting to the wiki quickly:
- what was that URL again ... um ... usask.ca/wiki ... no that's not right
- what do you mean I have to log in to something else?
- good grief, where is the thing? what did I call it? how do I add it to my favourites?
There is great potential to have information in one place for a group of people. Everyone can edit the content and previous versions are saved (kind of like Google Docs), but I like that I can save a variety of things in one place. For example, I've created a list of resources for a project that are a combination of journal articles, web pages and internal documents. I can create a wiki page with citations and links along with explanations about why these documents matter for the project. I would much rather have a pertinent thing archived in a project wiki than floating around in my email somewhere. And you can pull together more than just documents, which is what jellystone is often used for. I guess that really has been my goal over the past long while - to find a place to bring things together so that I can find them again and so that I can easily share these things with others. I was hoping this would catch on for some of my project groups, but I'll need to keep working on this.
So, I think wikis have a lot of potential for us. We try so hard to bring a variety of things together in the catalogue for our users, but we haven't established very good methods for our own records or project management. With all of these social tools we are learning about maybe we can start using them to make collaboration more effective and maybe even a bit fun.
p.s. Always use the "favourite" function in the UofS wiki or you'll never find your page again
LS&IT does in fact use the campus wiki for both projects and documentation. It's been a mostly successful venture, although it's use grew out of extreme need. It is inevitable that when one of your coworkers is away, something will happen that only that one person knows how to fix. The wiki has allowed us to capture some of that knowledge centrally, so that we have to re-invent less of the wheel when someone is on leave or vacation. Desperate times call for documentation.
ReplyDeleteAnd as you noted, unless the entire group buys into the wiki (or whatever other technological tool is being used) it will fail miserably. LS&IT had a wiki several years ago, but it was rarely used. It wasn't until recently that everyone got on board.