Wiki Walking: Whistle While You Work

Yes, the above title is more my own love for alliteration, so please forgive its cheesiness. Wikis are like…

The dog from Up: intelligent, sometimes random, lovable, and a part of a community. They’re a different breed of community from the ones I’ve talked about before like Myspace or Facebook because those are centered around the social process. However, wikis are based around the collection and catalogue of information . For instance, Wikipedia, where the name comes from, catalogues information that its users find relevant from city information to videogame plot summaries to political upheavals. There is nary a topic I can think of that is not on Wikipedia for a person’s reading pleasure.

But, it’s different still from a traditional encyclopedia by virtue of being edited before. A short history on dictionaries and encyclopedias show they were motivated into existence by people wanting to preserve a microcosm of culture. Since culture can be shown by the information it possesses . So, that’s why an encyclopedia has information on U.S. Presidents rather than potential social conspiracies. Consumers are more likely to purchase information that is relevant to them. Wikipedia Is different by virtue of cataloguing information on such a massive scale that it could hardly ever be entirely read through. This means that Wikipedia’s content is chosen passively by the reader rather than selected But can individual organizations use Wikis to impact their own learning environments?

I think Wikis are a perfect example of a tool being used by users that has varying levels of success not dependent on leadership. Leadership is a variable in a wiki community since contribution needs to come from a variety of sources and intelligences rather than a guide intelligence. Of course, there can be a hierarchical leadership in a wiki community and in fact, as discussed in early posts, these positions are usually reserved for the physical leaders (those that maintain and run the service rather than just provide content). However, in a school or business, wikis be a way for individuals to contribute information that is normally shared through dialogue. For instance, a person might be more likely to discuss etiquette in the workplace on a forum such as a wiki where he or she is not the only contributor. Being able to have numerous people edit one file at once can affect the dynamics of the group from being centered on one figure to giving each person a self-assigned role. Don’t like to do content? Fine, there’s plenty of work to do editing the style used. Don’t like either? Then editing content mistakes or sourcing errors might be your thing.

Overall, wikis have many levels of organizational contribution and none have to be leadership promoted. Now, this does not mean that natural leadership does not happen, its just that pre-assigned leadership is less effective than normal. When content is the central issue, the person who contributes the most might well become the leader or someone who edits a category across multiple articles.