I played with editing a page on Oakton’s wiki today. I used the link from Richard’s week 2 list of activities to get to the wiki. I looked through the favorite restaurant section and decided to add a review of my own. I hadn’t signed in and just clicked the edit button. After writing a short review, I clicked save only to discover that all of the previous reviews had been deleted and the only text left was what I’d just written.
I browsed the history of the page and saw that the other material was still available. Then I went to the help area and learned about “revert.” I copied my review and then tried to revert the page to the way it was before I’d entered my information. Before I could revert, I had to log in (Back to the list of sign ins and passwords to figure that specific log in!). Once logged in, I reverted the page, pasted my information and saved without a problem. It’s good to have the history on a wiki so it is possible to revert to previous entries as needed. Neophyte users, like me, can unknowingly delete or change content without meaning to when the intention was to add to the content.
As we consider using wikis more widely with library services, I think we need to think about how much users can edit material, who has access to the information and how often we need to manage the content. It’s very frustrating to find dead links or outdated material when doing information searches and I think it would affect our credibility if we allow our electronic resources to include unreliable information or links. I think the wiki format may be useful in the assignment central area. Faculty can provide the syllabus and assignments. We can provide links to our resources. Students, faculty and librarians can post questions and updates. To me this seems the place to start with this particular web 2.0 resource. It’s going to require a marketing/education campaign with the faculty and a librarian to monitor it very regularly.