Wikis

In his session on wikis, Dickie brought up a really good point (well, he brought up several, but I'll only relay only one). He mentioned that some folks at the WAC conference had begun to refer to Google Docs as wikis. While each functions similarly, Dickie was (rightly) hesitant to call this new species a wiki because of the baggage brought with all its associations (Wikipedia, obviously). In my recent work, I’ve taken to calling these sorts of environments “versionable” writing spaces and includes any species like wikis/google docs or any other open-content writing environment. In find this sort of recalibration interesting because it reminds me that we must be constantly aware of the processes for which we engage these applications—collaborative spaces, saved drafts—and that we cannot get tied to a specific application, even if it was the genus creator.

Speaking of specific applications, I don’t know how many of you use wikis but here’s a really great site where you can compare any number of available wiki (versionable, heh) applications. according to price, allowable size, interface, etc. Be warned, there are many more wiki-like applications out there than you probably ever wanted to know about.

~CB