Archive for the ‘Wiki’ Category

The folks at Common Craft explain Wikipedia in their new instructional video. The video details “the tools, policies and people that make Wikipedia articles factual and high quality”.

Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState, blogs for Mashable about How To: Use Wikis for Business Projects. If you’re thinking about using one of these collaborative tools in your workplace, you’ll want to check out his tips and recommendations:

• Seed the Wiki
• Capture Feedback
• Beware the Wiki-Wary
• Applying Wikis to User Communities
• Just the Facts
• Choosing the Right Wiki

Matthew C. Clarke, Business Area Executive with Rocket Software, writes about Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage in this month’s issue of Boxes and Arrows. The article describes the CorVu company’s initiative to use wikis to capture the internal knowledge of its products and also to disseminate it to their customers. The company used two wikis to capture knowledge from two teams of employees – an R&D wiki and a Professional Services wiki, and then a third public, customer wiki to disseminate a sanitized version of that knowledge.

“Like many companies, CorVu has extensive knowledge of its own products and a desire to make that knowledge available to customers. A major block to achieving that desire has been a lack of people with the time to either record the internal knowledge or to fashion the knowledge into a customer-ready format. We needed to spread the load so that a broad range of developers, tech writers, professional service consultants and others could all contribute what time and knowledge they had to a shared goal. Our hope was that a process built around several Wiki sites would facilitate this collaborative approach.”

The folks at Online Best Colleges have compiled a list of 100 Twitter Tools to Help You Achieve All Your Goals. Each application in this handy guide is divided into the following categories:

• Twitter Analysis
• Information Gathering
• Network Building & Management
• Twitter Management
• Sharing Tools
• Organization & Productivity
• Life Tools
• Business & Finance
• Health
• Blogging

And for even more check out the Apps section of the Twitter Fan Wiki.

Walt Crawford discusses the current state of blogs and wikis in the library field in this month’s issue of Cites & Insights. Based on his presentation at the 2009 OLA SuperConference in Toronto, his article Shiny Toys or Useful Tools? discusses trends and presents over 30 success stories.

“We’re out of the shiny new toy phase for blogs (and
wikis). I’m guessing most libraries these days will only
start blogs after making reasonably certain the blogs
will serve real purposes and will be updated regularly.
I’m guessing very few library people start blogs in the
expectation of becoming rich and famous.”

via Librarian.net

Encyclopaedia Britannica now allows readers to suggest edits to encyclopedia entries which are then inspected by the resource’s editors for approval. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Britannica aims to turn around edits within 20 minutes. Many of these changes/additions will appear in the print edition of the encyclopedia.

Cameron Chapman at Mashable has put together a mega-list of over 100 Wiki Tools and Resources. If you’re in the market for a wiki software program, you may want to check out this post for suggestions. And if one hundred isn’t enough for you, click over to their previous post The Wiki Toolbox: 30+ Wiki Tools and Resources.

Thinking about starting a wiki for your library? Read about the different ways that four companies are making the most out of wikis and reaping the rewards of these collaborative tools in Wikis That Work In The Real World. Here’s a bit about just one:

“Angel.com, a 70-employee subsidiary of Micro Strategies that provides interactive voice response software, has more than 10,000 internal- and external-facing SocialText wiki pages. That’s from about 100 employees, customers, and partners with access.

One customer-facing wiki acts as a knowledge base for Angel products, while others for employees include video tutorials, training quizzes, and space for collaboration efforts, from developing marketing ideas to planning company picnics.

New employees get an hour of wiki training and set up a personal space that’s like a social networking profile.”

If you’ve been considering creating a wiki to collaborate with your team, launch a staff intranet, teach a class, or just store your brainstorming ideas, you might want to check out Mashable’s list of over thirty wiki products to get you going. And if you’re having trouble choosing which solution is a best match for your project, head over to WikiMatrix which will compare the front runners side by side.

Earlier today Google officially launched Knol which had previously been in beta and invitation-only (see previous coverage). Knol is a collection of authoritative articles, written by a community of experts and a direct competitor to Wikipedia. Knols are written by individuals or teams who are credited for their contributions and can share in the revenue generated from the Google Adsense ads on their subject pages. Readers can rate, review, and comment on knols as well as suggest changes or additions to the content which is subject to the article authors’ approval.

Further coverage:

Knol: Google Takes on Wikipedia – ReadWriteWeb

Google’s Wikipedia rival, Knol, goes public – C|Net News

Google Launches Knol, The Monetizable Wikipedia – TechCrunch

BusinessWeek updates their popular 2005 story “Blogs Will Change Your Business.” with Beyond Blogs in which they discuss Twitter and microblogging, social networking communities such as MySpace and LinkedIn, and wikis.

“But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like LinkedIn help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week. While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.”

Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb lists ten ways to search Wikipedia which receives over 683 million visitors per year. Aside from the encylopedia’s official search engine, he compiles a set of intriguing alternatives including semantic search engines, a combined search of all the Wikipedia websites including Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wiktionary, and a search which presents results as a mindmap of related entries. His top ten picks are:

1. Powerset
2. Wikiwix
3. AskMeNow
4. Similpedia
5. Gollum
6. Qwika
7. WikiMindMap
8. Wikiwax
9. Lexisum
10. Ask.com & SearchMash

Bonus site: Wikirage

According to TechCrunch, Wikipedia has garnered its 10 millionth article which is a biography of Nicholas Hilliard, a 16th century painter. The Wikipedia has entries written in 250 different languages, with English as the most popular, accounting for 2.3 million articles.

The JotSpot wiki service which offered spreadsheet functionality, photo pages, calendars, and file storage, within their wikis has been in limbo since Google’s acquisition of the company in late 2006. According to TechCrunch, Google has relaunched the application as Google Sites, a free service with up to 10 GB of storage. Wiki authors can embed Google Docs and Calendars into their wikis as well as YouTube videos, and make their sites public or private. Like the former JotSpot service, Google Sites’ wikis seem easily adaptable as intranets, team websites, virtual classrooms, or family organizers.

Seth Godin’s Squidoo knowledge community has created a scholar’s entrance called SquidKnol which seems to be a direct reference to Google’s Knol initiative. The interface encourages experts to enter their areas of expertise and credentials in order to create a Squidoo lens which will be indexed all over the Web. Interestingly, the “sample” lens which is linked from this page is the Insomnia Knol originally written for Google Knol and spotlighted in their press release last week. Google Knol is still only open by invitation only.