Friday, June 23, 2006
What is a wiki?
Joan has a good definition of a wiki in ODLIS. Brian started this wiki a few years ago to give the library a space to collaborate and share information. Locally, a wiki can replace something like the K: drive; it's an excellent vehicle to develop joint proposals, keep the library informed of new projects, and contribute new ideas. Globally, a wiki can bring a community of people in disparate locations together to create new knowledge and contribute to a a conversation, a goal, a project, an idea, a profession. Several library-focused wikis have been established in the last couple of years to demonstrate this point... Take a minute to view the LISWiki or the Library Success Wiki or, of course, the ubiquitous Wikipedia.
Reading the wiki
Accessing and reading the wiki is the same as accessing and reading any web page or web site. You only need to type in the URL. It's easy and fun!
Contributing to a wiki space
There are two ways to contribute to an existing wiki:
- Comments - Each page you view has a comments feature to it. If you set your page options in the beginning of your session, all your comments will be posted with your name and the date/time of the comment. These comments will be displayed at the bottom of the page content, in chronogical order.
- Edit - This feature is especially powerful when people are working jointly on a project. Each page has an "Edit" option in the upper right hand corner. The edit option will bring up a new screen that allows you to change the text or format of the wiki page. There is also a preview option so you can see what your edits will look like before you actually publish them. It is also good to know that the wiki has the ability to "remember" its recent edits. If you ever change something and then regret it (that happens to all of us), we can almost always recover the previous version of the page.
Starting your own wiki space
- Add a new page - There is a "new" box at the bottom of each wiki page. Type the name of the new page and press the "create" button and you have automatically started a new wiki space. The software will immediately open an edit window and off you go! A couple of important things to remember:
- your wiki space will be created exactly where you clicked on the "create" button, so make extra sure you are where you want to be (getting that changed is possible, but can sometimes be complicated)
- the wiki space will be live (public) as soon as you click the "Save" button! So be careful when building the space...
Editing mode options
You have a couple of choices when creating/editing a new wiki space. It is important to choose BEFORE you get too far along in the editing process.
- Structured text - this is a very basic form of text editing that follows some simple rules for formatting. You only need to learn a few rules to be proficient at getting things to display properly and there is a help page to get you started.
- HTML WYSIWYG - if you are more comfortable with WYSIWYG, however, there is an stripped down editor for that. It may not be as powerful as you are used to, but it does the job.
There are some other choices as well, but these are the most useful.
let's try this --Veronica, Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:37:52 -0400 reply
I hoep we all give this a try.
Changes --Jenny, Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:39:36 -0400 reply
It is useful to be able to track which changes have been made, by whom and when.
... --elpernj, Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:40:08 -0400 reply
This workshop is great fun
Wiki --xiaomei, Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:40:09 -0400 reply
Wiki is fun!
Changes --Jenny, Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:42:16 -0400 reply
I'm replying to what I just said, having been greatly inspired to do so.