Week #7 Thing #16 Wikis

Tonight it was my nephew's 28th birthday. He is a high school history teacher. Interesting how we got into a converstaion about Wikipedia. Many students use it thinking it will give them information for their research. The problem is anyone can make a wikipedia entry. Do some searches on Wikipedia you can find articles about private schools you thought no one knew about or even information about authors I like such as Susan Grant or Angela Knight. I know that I am not their only fan or the only one who reads their books. The neat things about Wikipedia is that if you look under External links you can actually find more reliable websites that may have more accurate information.

What is a Wiki? Well School Library Learning 2.0 defines it as "A wiki is a collaborative website and authoring tool that allows users to easily add, remove and edit content". That might be fun to try, maybe if I ever have time to spare, i'll edit and add some new information on my favorite authors.

I liked looking at some of the school wikis. Wikis could be a fun tool for maybe upper elementary and up to use to list information they know and then edits as they learn. If students are doing an animal or planet report they could list what they think is the answer to a question, then as they explore they can also make a bibliography lists websites they use to find the answers. I think it might also be fun for students to read a wiki on a famous person, then do research and see what they can add or delete.

Problems I see with Wikis are they could be time consuming especially if students have no internet access at home and also if someone does not like someone they could delete and change their information. I really enjoyed looking at Wiki's a beginner ways and how they summed up pros and cons.
Pros ( easy to use, anyone can make changes, flexible and expandable, )
Cons ( disorganzed, vandalism and spam, too open, not enough control). I also like the mention that Wikis we not for everyone. To me they are fun to read, but I will not use information from a Wiki like Wikipedia for my report.

I decided to add the Wiki Way graphic. To me, it means that there are different ways we may use Wikis. I would use a Wiki to get some basic information and to lead me to more reliable sources. I also feel it is important that students know that Wikipedia is not a reliable reference tool, but may lead you to reliable references.