Wiki Week #2 - Wiki Tips from the ALA

The ALA (American Library Association) has set up wikis to support their annual convention for the past two years. It was one of the conference wikis I wrote about yesterday. Not surprisingly they offer some good wiki editing tips to those who might want to use their Mediawiki effort. They also offer links to the Wikipedia Editing Fundamentals Page and the MediaWiki Handbook For Editors for more help on editing the wiki.

Meredith Wolfwater has led this effort and also offers her lessons learned. Here are the highlights that are useful to anyone doing a wiki. There is more detail in her post, ALA Wiki: What I learned and what I’m doing with it.

1. A wiki must have a specific purpose.
2. You can’t just offer a wiki to the public as a blank slate and expect participation
3. It’s good to add some content to the wiki before making it public
4. You need to make it very clear that people can add whatever they want to the wiki or they’ll ask you to do it instead of doing it themselves
5. Yes, spam is a problem, but a manageable one if you have enough loyal users
6. It is amazing to watch what a wiki can become (if you let the users be creative)

Like blogs, you also need some clear policy statements. Meredith offers sample guidelines for the Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki that she started after her ALA experience. She has appropriately made the development of these guidelines a wiki effort. enterprise wikis