Unfortunately, when that spam came on the wiki, I was flying home (hellish series of flights) from my vacation, but usually, I catch that stuff really quickly because I subscribe to the RSS feed of all changes made to the wiki.

There are a lot of other ways to prevent spam. You can password protect your wiki or put it behind your corporate firewall if its being used by a specific group. You can require people to register to edit the wiki (as I do with the Library Success Wiki). But really, the best ways to prevent it are good spam prevention software (plugins, blacklists, etc.) and a committed community. Unfortunately, that wiki never developed a committed community, which I largely attribute to the ALA’s lack of involvement in it. All I had offered to do was host the wiki for them (since they had wanted a wiki and did not know how to set one up), but I ended up being the person who had to maintain the wiki, kill spam, answer questions from ALA members who didn’t understand wikis, etc.

This frightens me, even though I’m an avid fan of this whole wiki thing. If a wiki that’s presented as exemplary is so readily trashed, and/or requires a high (perhaps impractical?) level of monitoring & maintenance, one has to wonder if wikis are yet another great idea that’s destined to be problematic in the grim Real World (i.e. Real Web) that we’re doomed to share with the idiot spammers.

A few years ago I installed a free QuickTopic discussion board on my site. That was a boon, at first–a wonderful concept & service, and librarians made good use of it. But recently it degenerated into nothing but an ugly nonstop spam factory. I got notes from people who were livid because they didn’t know how to unsubscribe; of course the only thing to do was kill the board.

I don’t mean to sound like a nag, not at all. It’s just that in order to help make wikis really work the way we all hope that they will, I’m afraid there needs to be plenty of attention focused on this issue. Thanks as always!

There are actually a lot of educators working with wikis in the K-12 environment. Since I work in higher education, it’s not an area I’m super involved in. I wonder how you would want to use a wiki with young people. Would it be about getting them to co-create the space or just collaboratively developing a space with other teachers for young people? Wikis really need a purpose, so you need to think about what purpose a wiki would serve. Just throwing one to a group of young people and telling them they can use it will not inspire them — you need to have a purpose and a topic that engages them (there is nothing magical about a wiki in and of itself — it’s how you use it). I think that’s priority #1. When using wikis in a K-12 setting, it’s definitely a good idea to protect the wiki so that only people in the educational environment can access it. And, like any good wiki, you need someone to monitor it so that people don’t post really inappropriate content or content that is outside of what the wiki was created for. I monitor my wiki for that as well — someone just posted an advertisement the other day and I deleted it because the Library Success Wiki should not be a space for people to advertise crap. But with a wiki, yes, you need to trust the population that is authorized to add information. You can’t really hold additions for moderation like with a blog. You either let people add stuff or you don’t. I think it can serve many useful purposes in educational environments, but I don’t really know how you specifically want to use it.

As to your second question, there are a lot of ways to get user-created comments. You can use a wiki, you can create a way that users can “tag” the items you’re cataloging (like with Flickr or del.icio.us), you could use a blog to get comments, or you could create a way for users to add comments to a database. I think a wiki might work for that, but it would really depend on the wiki and how you organize the information. I would definitely talk to people who are familiar with large-scale database projects like this, because they would have a lot more to add to the conversation. I think with anything as unstructured as a wiki, you have the likelihood of things becomming disorganized and hard to find and you can’t really create structured fields like I think you would need for a project like that.

Good luck with your projects!

There aren’t many wikis that offer the functionality you’re looking for, though there may be some that I don’t know of. I know Twiki either does offer feeds for each page or that’s a hack that people can do with Twiki http://twiki.org/ because I’ve seen several sites here and there using Twiki that have that functionality. Confluence http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ also offers that functionality, but it costs $$$. For some reason I thought Xwiki did too, but looking at it now, maybe it doesn’t.

I’m a little pressed for time right now, but I will get other questions as soon as I am able.