Week Seven: Activity One

This week's assignment particularly interested me as I'm looking into the feasibility of installing and running a Wiki as a supplement to our Intranet. I say supplement because my biggest worry with a wiki is that folks will attempt to use it to supplant our Intranet. I've already seen documents created at some of the branches that links to Memos and other resources that are on our Intranet. I'm not certain why work I've done was replicated or why such a shortcut was deemed necessary given that additions to the Intranet are posted on the news page for the site.

At any rate the biggest strengths of a Wiki for library staff in many cases is its biggest weakness. In a typical Wiki environment anyone who registers has access and may add/edit and/or delete content. In a trusted environment (ie a work team) this is generally fine. But having worked with Wikis for a couple of years now I've seen first hand the damage that the malicious can have on a Wiki for kicks. Here is a site that screenshot and saved some of the vandalism to Wikipedia over the years.

Wikipedia has combated that in recent years by setting up rollbacks and requiring sources for information. Unfortunately sometimes they take it just a little bit too far in trying to keep up the standards. These all, of course, extreme examples and not something that can be reasonably expected to happen every time a Wiki is used on the web. But it is something any administrator is going to have to consider when setting up their Wikis.

In FCPL's case I've decided to start small and limit the Wiki to Childrens Programming resources to start with. Once we see it in use and get a feel for the architecture and how it works I'll expand it to cover other resources. I don't expect it will ever replace our Intranet as some staff hope - if nothing else to maintain the standard that the Intranet is the official resource for FCPL staff.

I did like the BookloversWiki and could conceive of using something similar on FCPL.org.