The UBC Health Library wiki began in earnest in September 2006 – we are celebrating our second anniversary and I suspect will go over 1,000,000 page views by early October. However, as Eugene and I pointed out here, making a wiki work is a tough business. Does that mean we’re giving in to wikibots, spammers and the constant deluge of maintenance challenges? Heck, no.
Here are five (5) reasons why wiki’ing is hard work:
1. Content creation – creating new files is a little bit like writing encyclopedia entries so often I feel like I need to do a survey and literature review before I write something. Others have created content – but much of the wiki is my own.
2. Wikispam – not sure why, but the wikispam has just about killed me this month. I am deleting about 30 files a day. Ideally, I would like to have tighter controls in place including ‘closed editing’ to the wiki team. Funny, a lot of wikispam is in Chinese!
3. Updating entries – making sure entries are current is a constant challenge. In the last week, for example, I have been thinking about editing the teaching files, the search engine files (due to Infovell) and the systematic review searching file. This is taking up hours and hours of my time. Help!
4. Authority – I’m a generalist and feel ill-qualified to write certain entries in the wiki that I want to see created. I need to create a hybrid brain consisting of the expertise of Schardt, McGowan, Glanville, McKibbon and Kraft (I’m sure there are others I could get inspired by as I might have a few more bases covered).
5. Minimal use – I’m unsure as to how much the wiki is really being used. I know our LIBR534 students are using it and I get e-mails from health librarians who use it – and appreciate it. I may have to do a close analysis of the web traffic in my spare ‘moments’. 🙂
In sum, yes the wiki has been a hard, tough slog – and I have wanted it to work and be a collaborative platform. I’m still hoping…..wikification continues unabated