Hi all, I had the opportunity today to play around with creating and posting to a couple of Wikis. In particular, I posted a Wikipedia page about the Alaskanbeader at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alaskanbeader and while the post may not be stunning, what it could do for our beading community is. For example here is a link http://www.pristines-beads.com/howto.php to the How-To section of our website which explains such thrilling things as length of thread, needle size, to knot or not, etc. And here is a link on peyote stitch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peyotestitch. The neat thing about a Wiki, is that you the beader reading this blog just though, “Oh she should have included a link to how to do brick stitch.” Or something similar. Well, if this were a Wiki, you could just tap “edit this page” and insert what you had to share. This could be a great way to collect some of the old stitches before the few beaders that still know them are gone.
While I do not feel that my current knowledge base is officially up to crawling yet, as far as competently operating a Wiki, and truly understanding the pro’s and con’s of a wiki “room” over a blog, I am continuing to sort the details out. Like most of us, my Wiki experience has been primarily with Wikipedia, and while it may not always be perfect on insider details, the editability of the Wiki format makes adding to the collected body of knowledge nearly as easy as sending a neatly typed email. – Yes I know that CAN BE excruciating, but I am hyped, so I am ignoring those realities. Tonight folks the glass is at least half FULL. –
September 27, 2007 at 6:24 pm |
Optimism is always good. Wikipedia is, of course, an outlier in terms of the way wiki communities work because it is so large and successful… but the mechanism is the same and it provides an opportunity for anyone who is interested to make a contribution.
While there are similarities, blogs and wikis have fundamentally different operating patterns… the primary one being that a blog, even a shared one, has limited opportunity for people to collaborate directly on a single item. Even if authors all have rights to do so, there is generally no blog mechanism to track the history, see who made what contributions, revert, etc. So blogs are better at facilitating discussion that leads to a piece of work or commentary about an already composed piece, whereas wikis are better for multiple people to actually collaborate on a single discrete item.
In the case of a resources to collect stitches that may be lost as the people who know them grow old and pass on (which is a great idea, by the way), there are benefits to both models. A blog would be easier for people to contribute to because they could just post their materials as comments, but that ease of use comes at the cost of having someone centrally organizing the material… otherwise each user would have to be registered as a blog author, etc. With a wiki, once the user learns to edit, they can make immediate direct contributions and it is easy to untangle– so there is usually less administration in terms of making information available coherently, but more time spent dealing with individual article/piece content.