My first wiki is created

One of the ideas I had after going to the eLearning Guild conference this year was to create a wiki. This wiki would be for new nursing staff hires at our hospital and would be a common place where they could comment on what it’s like to be a new nurse. They could write about their first day, what it is like to work on a particular unit, and tips for studying (as many are grad students).

Well the good news is I successfully created my first wiki yesterday using PBwiki (thanks for the suggestion to use it for wikis Brent). Interesting though I started with wikispaces instead. I needed a wiki that was really easy to use as I am unsure of the familiarity of the users I am inviting to post to the wiki. Both were quite easy to utilize and format into my desired look. Also, I wanted a space where I could open it only to certain people to edit and both offered this.

So why the change from the wikispaces to PBwiki. Well the reasons were the same ones that came up over and over at the conference…

• what if someone posts something negative
• can people outside the organization see what is posted

I had to explain that the general thinking with wikis is that you trust that the providers of content that truly wish to grow and develop the wiki will police themselves and others within the group. If something derogatory is posted, someone else will surely edit it and remove the negative comments. At the conference an interesting video was shared showing the progression of a wiki from conception to a very robust document. The video was created by Jon Udell titled “Heavy metal umlaut: the movie“. One very interesting point in the movie shows a period of time where vandalism takes place and there are some nasty postings that a placed on the wiki, then taken off, posted on again – but larger, taken off, on, off, on and finally off. In real time, when this occurred, it took place over the course of 4 minutes. The question then was…”is this the same author posting, editing, reposting. The answer was no. Within that time frame 4 or 5 different individuals removed the offending comments to keep the wiki information true and factual.

Straight from THE wiki (Wikipedia):

“Open-source wikis (such as Wikipedia) have been criticized for their reliability: certain individuals may maliciously introduce false or misleading content.[4] Proponents rely on their community of users who can catch malicious content and correct it. Wikis in general make a basic assumption of the goodness of people.[4]“

Secondly, the concern was brought to me…we don’t want anyone outside the hospital to see the wiki. There was the concern of privacy here and again if something was said such as “I had a hard time finding parking” and someone read this, it may discourage them from applying for a position here.

That all being said, Wikispaces allowed for members only posting, but was visible to everyone. This can however, be altered for a very small fee. PBwiki allowed for a private wiki that only members could view. I also found that the wiki once set up has far little or no advertising on it as the wikispaces did. I found that I could manipulate the look and feel of it quite a bit better as well. One option that it doesn’t allow, except if you pay a small fee, was for 1 administrator. Every participant has the same access/edit rights to the site. But here again is where you have to trust in the “goodness” of the participants posting to the wiki.

I’m now extremely excited to see if/how the content will develop. I have already had several of the invited members login and sign up for the wiki. I’m just now waiting and watching for the contribution to begin.

Another suggestion that was brought up at the conference was to utilize the wiki, once the content appears to be at its maximum, to create an online course from the material.

Hopefully by next year’s conference I will have a year’s worth of postings to this blog, more then one wiki, and several new online courses.

Weird what I get excited about now a days.