Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration

Citation

Yeates, R. (2007), "Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 41 No. 1, pp. 92-94. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330710724926

Wouldn't it be great if you could write a book, put it on the Web and have others re‐write bits of it while they read it? It would make updates so quick that anyone could contribute easily and the result would be up‐to‐date, representative of a community's views and inherently engaging.

The term wiki derives from the Hawaiian wikiwiki, meaning “quickly” and refers to a multi‐author Web site using special software for social interaction which places less emphasis on hierarchical permissions and predefined structures than on other forms of content management systems. Wikis may form part of other systems, usually playing a more informal role, which attempts to engage more active contributors who may be geographically distributed and may have no strong contractual relationship with each other.

This is a normal information delivery work about a phenomenon that has fairly recently emerged from technical community obscurity as a result of information services such as the Wikipedia encyclopaedia. The success of Wikipedia, which now competes for student minds with Britannica, depends partly on its very rapid growth in scale, and credible, if controversial, levels of accuracy on many topics and partly on its effective exploitation of wiki software that has enabled a large number of contributors to write the work, albeit for a much larger audience of passive readers who treat it as a more conventional Web site.

The book's subtitle indicates that wikis may have a role in information work and collaborative activity, and it seeks to explain the possibilities for a non‐technical audience and give some examples of practice on the internet and in private intranets, based on open, closed or mixed user communities.

The emphasis on the philosophy and vocabulary of wikis in the opening chapter alerts the reader to the fact that wikis can have both fervent supporters and detractors and historically may have been excluded from mainstream business and public sector Web environments as a result. The publication of the book indicates that thinking has changed over the last few years as potential benefits and niche roles have become clearer for a number of sectors.

The book covers the general benefits (and problems) first. A chapter on wikis as information sources discusses the issues of an essentially newsy information source that may be completely or partially un‐moderated, but which is controlled by the behaviour of the entire user community. Some of the examples are followed by notes on citation of wikis.

Another general problem is how to find wikis and specific content within them. A chapter looks at metadata and examples of directories and search engines that cover wikis well. Unusual aspects, such as facilities for finding earlier versions of content, are common to wikis, but general search engines, such as Google, struggle to keep up with frequently changing content and may anyway not be used on intranet sites.

Library and information science, business and education are three sectors given a chapter each here, although the coverage of the first seems very superficial. More meaty are the explanations on how a wiki is set up and managed. Much emphasis is placed on how to evaluate a wiki before, during and after it has been set up, with some criteria for selecting good wiki software and some for finding good wiki content. There are two appendices, one containing a clear comparison of wiki sites and Web sites and the other offering questions for the evaluation of wikis as sources of information.

This is a good basic introduction to the topic, although there is some confusion between coverage of the topic for those seeking to select wiki software perhaps, as opposed to other Web content management software, and those simply seeking to understand a category of Web content and its origins. Neither viewpoint is covered in depth, although there are pointers to further information for both audiences.

Much of the content of the book applies equally to other Web content and also to content management software in general, although valid points are always worth reiterating. One problem here may be the authority of the work. The points made are mostly simple assertions, not justified by explicit evidence or extended discussion. If readers trust the author (and her contributing experts, whose biographies are included), then the work may be taken as a useful quick reference or a source for inspiration for staff training courses. Given the controversy surrounding the interactive social Web and Web 2.0 and the role they should play in libraries, this book may not address the issues with sufficient depth of weight of argument to satisfy many Web evangelists, and it would probably appear too dry for the uninitiated practitioner. Students might find it more use as a wiki itself, where they could comment on examples, question assertions and contrast the technology with others that are emerging.

Wikis, as a form of social networking, are a disruptive technology. They might be extremely useful for maintaining staff manuals, training materials and outreach resources if corporate politics permit. This textbook wraps wikis in comfortable paper chapters with a finite index and bibliography of reasonably up‐to‐date further sources. Its use could reasonably be complemented by looking up wikis in the Wikipedia and by reading open content material on Wiki science in the Wikibooks website (http://en.wikibooks.org/), where there are many open source textbooks.