I have used Wikis as a means of collecting information and for factual purposes a lot in the past. Many of my students turn to Wikis for this purpose also but I had never created one till last year in one of my MET course. I did not realize how much time and effort is need to create a Wiki. I also did not know that Wikis were based on so much collaboration and that there was policing of content that was entered in a Wiki. It is actually very interesting to see the collaborative process of creating a Wiki and seeing how edits can be rejected. When editing a Wiki you can definitely add your ‘two cents’ but that does mean your views or ideas will be accepted. They can very easily be vetoed. I think this is great because this insures that content is not misleading or inappropriate.
When I was creating a Wiki with a group member in one of my courses earlier on this year, I noticed that there was a typo in the Wiki title when we had finished the whole assignment. I went in and edited the name. When I did this, I did not realize that changing the name would result in our whole Wiki being overwritten with a blank new page. To my dismay everything got whipped. This was definitely a huge learning experience for me because the whole Wiki had to be redone but at the same time I learned more. There are many resources on the web that are helpful and give guidance on ways to create a Wiki and how to make certain components of a Wiki look a certain way. If it was not for these tools, I would have really struggled to make a Wiki.
Overall, I think the concept of Wikis are great. I really like that this is an open, collaborative resource that can be added to and adapted. This way everyone benefits because a Wiki is not based on knowledge from one person. Rather, it is based on knowledge from more than one person. As they say, two minds are better than one and this holds true for resources such as Wikis.
