Now this is something that I have personally found very useful in my studies thus far - a way to collaborate online with multiple editors / reviewers in the one document / web page. AKA the Wiki.
The features of a wiki are that it is driven by a simple text editor which allows for easy creation and editing of the page, provides intuitive linking between pages with hypertext links and keeps a track of changes made to the document over time. Its main benefit is the easy access to the document which is through the browser and doesn't require any specific editing tools or direct network access. Basically anyone with internet access can collaborate on a document providing access has been granted by the creator.
The most well known wiki of the all is Wikipedia. To try and illustrate the scope of wikipedia, a quote from co-founder Jimmy Wales (as cited in Lih, 2009) describes the potential of wikipedia as "Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
There is insurmountable controversy surrounding the creditability and reliance on information contained in the wikipedia pages. It is controversial in nature mainly because of its connotations of being an online encyclopaedia whilst being written entirely collaboratively by a legion of volunteers, none of whom are subjected to credibility checks. Wikipedia themselves acknowledge this by proclaiming "In most academic institutions, Wikipedia, along with most encyclopaedias, is unacceptable as a major source for a research paper" on their page about researching using wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2010). However, Wikipedia does have virtues beyond its limitation as a reliable academic source of information in that it has been recognised as a valuable source of up to date news, a point very succinctly illustrated in the youtube video showing the evolving entries about the London bombings as they happen (travelinlibrarian, 2006).
Again, ties nicely into Berners-Lees idea of a interactive and collaborative web 2.0 technology.....
Next week, we delve into social networking.....
References:
Lih, A. (2009). The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia. London: Aurum Press.
Travelinlibrarian. (2006, November 22). Wikipedia: London Bombings. [video file] Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8O-hv3w-MU&feature=player_embedded
Wikipedia (2010). Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia
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