#5 Playing around with PBWiki or Zoho Wiki

There are worse things than having users put drivvle on your wiki. What if you had a party and nobody came? I looked up arts and entertainment on one of the wikis in the discovery exercise and apart from the basic template with some links and four thumbnails of book covers no one added anything - no discussion, no stuff, nothing to do. "Hello?..hello..hello..
Anybody there?.. there.. there.. "


dull and sad - click


So not only can anyone contribute to a wiki, they *have to* or it doesn't work. If people don't join in you are left with the husk of a website, testament to the fact most of us have too much to do and not enough time to do it. This is probably more of a #4 comment than a #5 but anyway.


Back to #5. Freeware and wikis. Freeware is a wonderful democratic thing but sometimes you get what you pay for, so when stuff doesn't work you can't exactly demand to speak to the manager and ask for your money back. I spent some time diligently trying to post my blog on the PLMCLearning 2.0 Favorites wiki*. After working thru the 14 easy steps several times I enlisted the help of my friendly Learning 2 mentor. She had a few goes (about 42 steps) and then gently explained to me that I was using freeware... I decided it was time to get on with my life. I tried the slvpractice wiki instead, a much more rewarding experience - found some stuff on the website -select, copy, paste, edit, save - Bingo! That's more like it.

#4 Wikis

#4 Wikis

Oh Dear, is that the time?! I have a bit of catching up to do.
Wikis: Who doesn't like wikis? Anyone who was here during the SLV website's last ice age, (you may remember there was a period of several years when nothing could be changed because it was being "updated"), well any such person would jump at the chance for a collaborative website where people with info could just put it out there and everyone could immediately share that knowledge. Yes there is the potential for wild hooligans to put poorly composed tracts of inaccurate garbage up there (there are plenty of professional journalists and web aficionados who can do that too) but mostly they don't. As with any information source, the reader has to take some responsibility for their own gullibility/laziness. If you know how a wiki works you may suspect that it is not 100% reliable all the time, but for quick info and news, particularly for a specific user group eg a workplace, what a great idea!