Wiki activity
I have been using wikis for a number of years mostly for knowledge management in a work context and I have never seen the discussion utility/page before. It’s great to learn new things. This part of the wiki is great for seeing how a wiki page evolved and why the content was added etc. I find one of the problems of the wikis is that it’s quite hard to get a good understanding of the page history & changes etc (particularly as not everyone comments their changes). Adding discussion pages to wikis to this helps make it more transparent I find. I think for creating a document or a resource of some description a wiki with this feature is a great tool. However for more general discussion I think a basic threaded forum is the appropriate tool to use.
Overall I find wikis to be great tools for collaborative learning tool for groups that are not in the same location. A vast improvement on having emails going back and forward etc when trying to create a document.
One of the challenges with wikis I find is that in the work contexts I have used them in they are sometimes created with enthusiasm and then forgotten about. Left out dated and not particularly useful as the point was usually to have an up-to-date resource repository. Also, I find wikis navigation not particularly intuitive at times, I guess I am used to the old style book structure and would like a nice context page and index as well. I know this can be done but it’s not automatic and usually takes a lot of time from my experience & not all authors have the knowledge or the motivation to label/tag content properly.
July 10th, 2011 at 5:26 pm
That’s very true: maintain wikis as a live space can be challenging–particularly in organizations where folks have multiple tasks within which the wiki can become depriortized.