Wiki-riffic

Partially I'm writing about wikis in order to get more space on my personal wiki, but I'm also writing to sing the praises of the Wiki which my Museum Informatics class uses.

I use the free PB Wiki for my personal lists. It tends to be a bit more flexible in structure than other free wikis that I've seen and has a nice, soothing color-scheme. Right now, my account is private, but I'll likely be making it public soon. It's just too messy to share at the moment, since I haven't pinned down exactly what I want to use it for, but I have fun with it.

The class that I am taking extensively uses the "unofficial" GSLIS wiki. I think we're the only class in LIS that is exclusively using a wiki for our course-planning and presentation. It's an interesting concept and allows us to do a lot of collaborative work outside of class time.

Anyone have suggestions about how to use wikis? One of the SCA groups that I'm involved with, the Slavic Interest Group, had a discussion about using a wiki to gather research information, but the main problem which we were anticipating was that we'd likely get a lot of "bad" information that we'd be continually having to delete or annotate on the wiki. Not a horrible thing in an of itself, but we just ended up not wanting to mess with the possibility of having to edit racist, nationalistic junk every hour or so. It's hard to figure out a way to allow freedom of speech while maintaining a civil discussion when you get into themes such as whether the early Rus' were Viking-origin or locals. But that's another blog for another day.