In light of what I was writing about wikis and participation, I would like to ask for your help. I have been wanting to have some guidelines on the Library Success Wiki, similar to those that govern the Wikipedia. However, I never wanted to do it on my own for fear that it would be perceived as “authority from above.” So I’d like you to help me create a good list of guidelines for the wiki. I started a Guidelines page and got the ball rolling by listing a few. Please feel free to edit mine and add to the list. This wiki belongs to all of us and I’d like for it to be governed by guidelines that we can all accept.
Posted infree the information! Wikis
Help create your wiki’s guidelines!
Meredith Farkas is a faculty librarian at Portland Community College in Oregon. From 2007-2021, she wrote the monthly column “Technology in Practice” for American Libraries. Meredith was honored in 2014 with the ACRL Instruction Section Innovation Award, in 2008 and 2011 with the WISE Excellence in Online Education Award and in 2009 with the LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. She has been writing the blog Information Wants to be Free since 2004.
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Broken wikis means… people suck?…
With the overwhelming success of Wikipedia, it would be hard to say that wikis were a complete failure — wouldn’t it?
A little while ago, Luis Suarez from IBM posted some thoughts about wikis. where he quoted from Jeremiah’s Strate…
(In response to Meredith’s posting)
Don’t worry about being seen as an “authority from above.” After all, Library Success Wiki is your original idea, and you should take pride in (and credit for) having started it. Besides, if someone knows that a professional librarian started the wiki, it gains some credibility. Establishing some general guidelines shouldn’t deter people from adding their own ideas, either. Such guidelines will help people figure out if their contributions would fit within the parameters of your wiki. If not, they are certainly free to start one of their own. After all, that’s part of what “Web 2.0” is about.
I started my own Wiki (“False Drop Follies”) just recently, and I provide some sample entries to give people an idea of how I envision the blog. A bit “heavy-handed” in a sense, but I hope that people will see the parameters I have established as helpful suggestions. As you hope for Library Success, I hope that contributors will improve the quality and scope of my wiki. After all, I threw it together within a matter of a few hours. How it develops is up to the contributors, which will save me a lot of work (though I at least plan to continue listing false drops that have led people to my blog).