Those Wicked Wikis.....

Greetings.
I must confess that when I read of some of the problems people had with RSS feeds I put Week 4 in the 'too hard' basket and moved on to Week 5 and wikis. I hope to come back to Week 4 later ...
I found the most amazing thing about wikis to be that the German equivalent of wikipedia is regarded as superior to the 'proper' encyclopedia in terms of the quality of its content. I would have worried about the content of wikis being open to vandalism or at best inaccurate input, particularly when one reflects on the level of vandalism in the real world, unless access with editing rights is very closely controlled. I can see that wikis are a very democratic form of information sharing and in line with current social attitudes of equality of rights, freedom of expression, etc, etc. And I must confess that despite my reservations as to the quality of the information I do use Wikipedia as an information source to answer client enquiries. I am reassured by hearing that Wikipedia employs a small army of people to vet entries .....
With reference to any three of the cited wikis ....
A. The Book Lovers Wiki. This is essentially a collection of submitted reviews indexed by genre. I see it was operated in 2006 but not 2007 - it would be interesting to know what prompted the library to change tack. Maybe it was recognised that having the review attached to the item record is more useful to patrons than in a separate wiki. So the wiki is now more a piece of local literary history or as the front page puts it, "'a snap shot in time' of what our club members read during the summer [of 2006]". Reading between the lines, the desire to experiment with a new technology seemed to be at least partly the motivation to etablish the wiki.
Such a wiki is useful as a gimmick and as a way of getting together a number of tagged reviews without a lot of labour on the part of library staff. However if the defining quality of a wiki is interaction and ease of editing existing material, one wonders how a wiki is better than an ordinary website that allows postings as there isn't - or shouldn't be - the need to edit reviews, i,e, opinions, posted by others.
Wikis shine where the knowledge to be communicated keeps changing, is refined through mutiple inputs and is cumulative - the value of the sum of the content is more than of the individual components, not I would have thought the case with collected independent reviews.
B. Mint Museums Wiki. The initiators define a wiki as 'a type of website that allows you, the user, to add or edit the content of the website' - a collaborative information resource. So the wiki both provides information from the Museum about particular collections and exhibitions and enables others - "curators, educators, docents and other users" - to add their expertise and knowledge to those bones. Thus those contributing to the wiki would be a community of interest and people with genuine knowledge to share and likely to 'spark off' one another. So the sum of the content is more than the individual components as it includes reactions to earlier posts. The wiki is password-protected and such a subject area is likely to attract only genuine contributors anyway. I noted there were 503 revisions of one page so the wiki is obviously valued (used by a large number of people!) and active .....
C. The Full Library Success. This is described as "a one-stop shop for great ideas and information for all types of librarians" and as such should be a great professional resource for librarians. Editing now requires submission of an email address because of vandalism but that is not an onerous control on content - though pointing to one of the issues with wikis. Having a parallel discussion page where people can post opinions and reactions about a topic seems like a good idea, and likely to reduce unnecessary editing without stifling input. Warnings that "personal attacks" and copyright infringements will be deleted may be pre-emptive strikes or may point to problems that have occurred. The warning against using the wiki for advertising points to another potential issue that I haven't seen raised elsewhere. A quick look at a sample revisions page showed that a considerable number of edits were reversed by the wiki manager suggesting either that freedom of expression can be abused or a conflict between the democratic ideals of a wiki and the vision of the wiki manager ......
I looked at the WikiNorthia site and while this is obviously at an embryonic stage has great potential. However it might need a full-time manager and hence lie outside the library sphere .. unless a Local History Librarian was able to assume responsibility. I thought about how it compared with a blog like Southern Tablelands History Matters and felt the wiki would have more uneven content in terms of quality but cover a much wider cross-section of information inviting as it does content under the broadest of headings as opposed to comment/reaction to posted material. So the wiki has greater potential to attract and store information.
Also the sample intranet procedures manual would be great for a really big library or one operating from multiple sites like some university libraries - templates or standards for input would be easy to manage, input would be accurate because by the on-the-ground practitioners, and the manual would always be up-to-date.

I always was stronger on theory than practice .... the required input to the NSW learning 2.0 wiki has been made. Not without problems - like the window warning me that if I left the site no-one would be able to use it for a time (I envisaged crashing the whole thing) and putting my name instead of "Guest" - I didn't expect that bit to appear onscreen. But once I realised that you just typed on despite what was already there being in html language it was quite easy. I commend the two video tutorials too - particularly the Wikis in Plain English may be very basic but that is just what an IT Nitwit needs!