27 September 2008

Wikipedias or Wikis



Hawaiian word meaning 'quick' named by Ward Cunningham in 1994. It is an asynchronous collaborative tool he developed for use on the internet. They allow people to contribute to and add definitions or topics. Anyone can edit web 2.0 are offering low-cost, i.e wikis can enable users to build documentation and knowledge base systems. Wikis are flexible, many are free and an open source for information. Authors can choose to "subscribe" to a wiki page, meaning they are notified via email when anyone tries to change a page. They are free, of course, to re-visit the page and investigate what was written Also, the wikis software keeps track of every edit made and it's a simple process to revert back to a previous version of an article.

Wikis are used in libraries for: Document management Archiving or documentation Intranet collect best practices, good ideas, useful articles Collaboration by many (but wikis in libraries do have controlled access.) Knowledge base Project management tool internal Staff communication They are different from blogs in that they belong to no specific organisation, anyone can edit other people's work no one owns the content, unlike in blogs where a person owns their post and organised chronologically. Examples are: http://en.wikiversity.org. http://en.wikipedia.org, http://en.wikibooks.org. Wikiversity will be discussed below.

Wikiversity
This is an open course material started in 2006 and is devoted to learning resources and learning projects for all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. Look at its projects Wikipedias: An encyclopedia, Wikibooks: Textbooks http://en.wikibooks.org, Wiktionary: Dictionary, Commons: Media repository - Images, sound files etc. Wikisource: Source texts, Wikinews: News stories, Wikiquote: Quotations, Wikispecies: Directory of species

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