My Wiki Experience

Being a strong advocate of wikis I was surprised that I found a lot wrong with the use of the Wiki in the context in which it was used. Perhaps I shouldn’t say wrong but rather that the context and activities were not best served by the affordances and use of the wiki.
Although Wiki looks at collaborative knowledge construction through the editing of common text our activities could have been better facilitated and tracked using a threaded discussion forum where posts could be organised and replies to individual posts easier to thread. The thread of the discussion in the Wiki space was difficult to follow. Also, you could not see who made what changes, which I believe is essential in such collaborative and multilayered editing activities.
What was really important was the confirmation that not because a tool is a great tool it cannot be used even within the context of which it is intended, in this case collective knowledge construction. Within any given activity tools; context and expected activites; needs (e.g. tracking/threading editing or responses) and benefits must be assessed independently and intergated in order to choose the right tool to optimise experience.