To mark the tenth birthday of wikis (which, um might have been a few days ago but hey :0) here’s something that’s been bubbling away in me for a while…
While thinking out the centered communication paper it occurred to me that I was also writing an anti-wiki treatise of sorts.
So to check out if I with any likeminded souls I rolled over WhyWikiWorksNot and it doesn’t particularly look like it. Lots of stuff about forums and presentation and wotnot but nothing really along the lines that I’ve been thinking.
Which is that one of the biggest problems about wikis (and which is shared, by the likes of me on occasion, in relation to blogs & co) is the ‘wikis are everything we need’ approach.
The more I think about how wikis work, to be honest, the less enamoured I am of them… they are useful repositories of knowledge / project management / group things-to-do tools but that’s about it. They aren’t centered on individuals but on an abstract ‘community’ (although not in a town square way), they are horrendously difficult to track (ever subscribed to a wiki RSS feed… did you unsub fairly shortly after!) and they suffer from all the syntactical and formatting issues that are mentioned in WWWN.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a need for them, but it’s a pretty simple one which revolves around wikipedia-esque project and workplace collaboration (supported, importantly, as I argue in the paper, by other means of communication).
C’mon, prove me wrong…
Yeah ok, I’ll bite. Where I think they work best is in a well-defined community, with common purposes and a common activities. Wikis can help teams working together by providing a common space for their work, to coordinate, etc. Having that sort of shared space (which need not be a wiki) is tremendously useful for this. The fact that they aren’t centered on individuals is very much a good thing for that use – if group work consists of only separate, individual opinions, you’re not going to get far.
Which is not incidentally, to disagree with you. Pick the right tool for the right job – and wiki is certainly not it if the idea is to present a single viewpoint. I regularly use a multitude of different tools. And of course, it makes no sense to talk about the usefulness of a tool without a context.
My main issue with your post is that I think it highly devalues both the amount and importance of group work that does in fact go on “in the real world” as well as the substantial problems that exist for effectively accomplishing that type of work. I’d suggest the “problems” in expressing individual opinions that don’t factor in the ideas of others are demonstrably less an issue. :-)
Don’t you think that anything fails inserted into the sentence “[Insert tool here] is everything we need”?
I’ve always cautioned against driving nails with a saw (e.g. trying to use one tool for every job). See http://www.tenreasonswhy.com/weblog/archives/2003/05/15/driving_nails_with_a_saw.html
Matter of fact, James, I first used the “driving nails with a saw” phrase two years ago in response to a somewhat sweeping argument from YOU that roughly equated to “Weblogs are everything we need.” ;-)
I’m still arguing the same kinda stuff Greg…
http://incsub.org/?page_id=19
I don’t need to point to the irony here either, do I ;o)
I guess what I was trying to say, a bit, was that wikis are overstretched in their scope… that there’s a kind of WikiMania that has, IMO, killed off a lot of early enthusiasm.
For example, the author of this article lamented to me that the students hadn’t really communicated with each other, my response was ‘not surprised’: http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/augar.html
And I guess that with this idea of ‘Centredness’ I’m starting to understand why.
I don’t think that you can have an effective group (apart from in very rare circumstances, humanity, knowledge, government etc.) without representation of the individuals… which I don’t think Wikis (or the LMSs) provide.
Thanks for biting BTW :o)
Cheers, James