Comments on: Is a wiki useful in a team environment?

By: Peta

Peta — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 07:49:58 +0000

A visitor to my library (young undergraduate in library science course) recently asked what I (41 y.o – young for a librarian I suppose) was doing. I said I was collaborating with other university staff using a wiki. “What’s that?” she said.
She sounded as though she liked the idea.

By: CW

CW — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 07:20:35 +0000

Genywannabe, I agree, you will need a “wiki champ” to keep pushing it, and even then staff aren’t necessarily going to use it. (Yes I am speaking from experience here..)

I guess it depends on your aim – if it is very clearly articulated and there is a need for it, it may work. I dunno about the gen y thing. Keep us informed!

By: genywannabe

genywannabe — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 03:33:23 +0000

We are thinking about using wikis or blogs as a way of staff supporting one another. But without a “wiki champ” I don’t know that staff will use it. We imagine that our target group will be students who work in the library as rovers and we are making assumptions that gen y will embrace this collaborative tool. Are we being unrealistic?

By: librariesinteract.info

librariesinteract.info — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:07:57 +0000

[...] It provides us with the wiki environment that I’ve posted about before [...]

By: CW

CW — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:43:56 +0000

I love wikis because they allow me to be a ‘gardener’. (The green sort, I kill ) I’ve been plodding along mostly singlehandedly trying to develop a wiki to show my colleagues how useful it can be.

My big question is, how do you get that staff ‘buy-in’, so that everyone uses the wiki? Everyone I’ve shown the wiki to agrees how useful it is and how wonderful a tool it is, and yes we need it etc but then they go back to using Word and track changes and email and my head hurts…

On a different note, just found a great list of articles on wikis as library tools, from Library Boy in Canada.

I dunno about gnomes, Sirexkat!

By: Sirexkat

Sirexkat — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 11:09:57 +0000

Stop press… by co-incidence I have come across an even cooler term for someone who manages a wiki, “WikiGnome”.

By: Sirexkat

Sirexkat — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:53:17 +0000

Hey, with a medium sized group and a medium sized project, why not go the whole hog and use a fully fledged CMS (Content Management System)? I’ve used tikiwiki for a project at work. Although it is a bit “toy” (OK, the blogs are a lot toy) it does have a FAQ module that everyone can contribute both questons and answers to..plus polls, quizzes, wiki, forums, image and file galleries etc.

By: librariesinteract.info

librariesinteract.info — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:25:57 +0000

[...] I read Corey’s post on the use of wikis in team environments and was writing up a comment when I realised I’d gone off topic. So, I snipped the last bit from the comment and decided to develop it further here… [...]

By: Peta

Peta — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 08:32:16 +0000

I really like using wikis. My sister and I used one to plan a recent family ski holiday. Excellent for to-do lists, what to pack, links to the ski hire place and lists of what we would hire, chalet website, what to do in Thredbo. It was great and if we plan another ski trip then some of this information will be really handy.

I can also see how easily a wiki page can become unwieldy. A wiki is ideal for the collaboration part, but once a group is happy with the content perhaps faq pages could be migrated to a blog sort of structure with categories being used to link up similar questions.

By: Librarian Kathryn

Librarian Kathryn — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 08:02:12 +0000

We use a wiki on PBWiki to keep track of what we are doing with lint. We have a list of jobs to do, a few notes about how we are doing things and a stats page.

One of our team suggested that we have a “wiki gardener”. I love the term, and can see that you have already been pruning and planting subject trees (groan) with RUBRIC.