Wikis are a popular online collaborative publication like an online encyclopedia.The best known is Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to a wiki. Some say this makes them less authoritative than academic journals and traditional encyclopedias where contributions are written by qualified experts and peer reviewed. Others say wikis are always more up to date than print encyclopedias, e.g. a word like "folksonomies" probably won't appear in any print encyclopedia. It may appear that allowing students to use wikis for research purposes encourages plagiarism and discourages in-depth research. However, students are meant to use more than one source and cite their sources, even if their preferred source is Wikipedia. I was interested to read that in Germany, it is more popular than the revered Brockhaus print encyclopedia: "in 43 articles out of 50, the German language Wikipedia came out on top" according to this week's Learning 2.0 lesson on the website. This applies in a country with a history of extensive funding for research and a large print publishing industry.
For this week's Discovery, I looked at Wisconsin Portal at Wisconsin Heritage Wiki. A search on "movies" yielded 'screenwriting course' without the word "movies" in the text. I wondered if this is because the entry has been tagged somehow with the word "movies".
The Princeton Public Library's "Book Lovers Wiki" was a snapshot in time of a summer reading club, being maintained as an archive using pbwiki. This one has closed membership. It says staff upgraded the library catalogue to include reviews; there is a link to reviews. I think this kind of catalogue upgrade using wiki is a good idea. There is also a link "report an inappropriate review". It's not clear to me how you'd join the wiki.
Wookiepedia at http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, is a star wars wiki. There was a note under "wookiee" that said editing of the site by new or unregistered users was temporarily disabled due to recent vandalism. It appears that wikis do have editorial standards, as this one has "official policy pages". One of these contains a warning about spoilers on the wiki. It says a spoiler is considered and flagged as such till one month after the official release date of a particular product in the US or the country of origin. An "official policy page" has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard.
Another application that might work well within a wiki is an exhibition catalogue, e.g. for a local history collection.
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