Wikis

I'm a fan of the wiki. I haven't contributed all that much content to them, but I use them regularly as an information source. When I was recently researching different tools to use for providing online training as part of my role, I typed the names of some of the software packages into Wikipedia to read about the features that each of the programs had, what type of files they could output, etc. This is information that I would have expected to find on the companies' websites, but it was nowhere to be found. I think wikipedia, and wikis in general, are great for informal research, and can point you in the right direction for further research from more vetted resources.

I liked the historical posts used in the St Joseph's County library wiki, though they seem to be using it more as a Content Management System than a wiki, since each document seems to be updated only by the librarian who writes it, and with librarians only doing the editing. I think they could accomplish much the same thing with a CMS such as Joomla, so I'm not sure if that is the best example of how to most effectively use a wiki.

The Library Success wiki seems to be more into the spirit of things, allowing anyone to sign up and make changes. It would be potentially harder remove any vandalism, but in the long run they may get much more varied and useful information. The key is getting the community together who's willing to look for and correct any vandalism or inaccurate information that may be present.

I was all set to say that for the first post I would be writing an entirely positive post without any "well, I'm not sure if this will work in government because X", but one just occurred to me. Legislation around records management for Queensland State Government organisations is pretty rigid. It is a difficult task to keep on top of archiving all versions of a webpage as they are updated and removed to comply with the Queensland legislation around government records, and I would think that a wiki would amplify that difficulty by quite a bit - especially if members of the public are allowed to contribute. And then there's the issue of censorship claims if a public citizen's changes are reversed or removed. I'm sure there are answers to all of these issues, but I think it'll take some pretty smart people to come up with them.