I love wikis and have been using them for many years. However, I have not been generating/creating my own wikis. I tried to use wikis in Moodle but the program was so poorly put together that it made it unusable. I have also used PB wiki. That worked well as a program, but my execution needs some revision. It was a bit chaotic and to administrate and track changes took more time than I thought it should.
I love wikis, but my main gripe is that they have a very specific use and when people learn about them they go crazy and use them innaproapreaty, making the task harder than it needs to be. People want to use them as "web page". wikis are specificly designed as a colaborative tool for people to privide content and edit other peoples content (with or without administrative approval). So when people just want to give information (web 1.0) to a large group of people. By putting it in a wiki they are making things more complicated and inviting changes to content that they might not want changed.
The most famous of the wikis in the world is of course: wikipedia. Study and findings have been hurled over the bow claiming that wikipedia is innaccurate or accurate. What studies have also found is that there is approximatly a 10-15% error in topics of accademic research (history, science etc.). Is this a greater error than others encyclopedias? who knows. What I do know is that school is about teaching kids to be critical of their sources and to verify information. I have no problem if kids want to search topics on wikipedia. However, they can not site wikipedia. They need to verify the information from a secondary source so they cooroborate. I did this before wikipedia as well... you know, when kids were looking up stuff in books :)
People just need to be very carful about certain wikis and the information they give. wikipedia is on the forfront. They are quite open about articles that need verification and/or articles that are under dispute. The one issue I have with Wikipedia is that the topics are democratic. Meaning, if I edit an entry (wrong) and it is verified by enough other people... it becomes "truth". For 90% of the time, this is a great way of doing things, however there are times when the public is wrong. Think about the number of people who think Barack Obama is Muslim... or the misinformation about AIDS in the 80's and early 90's and of course the conriversies over topics like global warming. These issues need to be overridden and edited by experts.
Wikipedia says it has a team of experts looking at these contriversial topics.
What is and expert?
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