Wiki Resources

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Table of contents

1 What is a wiki? 2 Wiki wiki or how I learned to stop worrying and love the wiki 3 Help 4 Experimenting 5 Links and Further Reading

What is a wiki?

To quote from the WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb) website:

"Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly."

Wikis are a powerful way to communicate and collaborate. Because everyone and anyone can contribute content, immediately and without mediation, a community of users can create a resource without burdening any one user with extensive maintenance responsibilities.

Wiki wiki or how I learned to stop worrying and love the wiki

Though wikis are incredibly simple to use, learning to work with them can be a little daunting at first. The informal and sometimes chaotic world of the wiki can be a bit hard for librarians, especially, to embrace! The term wiki comes from the Hawaiian phrase wiki wiki meaning "quick" or "informal". Setting aside perfectionist tendencies will help you as you work with the wiki. Remember that you can't break the wiki, that contributing something incomple and poorly formatted is actually better than contributing nothing at all. The fun thing about the wiki is that you can post something half-done and ugly and come back a few hours later and find it finished and formatted. Trust the community of users to moderate such things.

Help

See the Help pages.

Experimenting

If you want to experiment with editing pages in a completely no-pressure environment, go ahead and play around in the MediaWiki Sandbox (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sandbox).

Links and Further Reading