Wikis

iKnowHow: NCVO and KnowHow NonProfit’s pilot wiki project

May 2012. As part of the pilot project, iKnowHow has taken three subject areas (setting up a charity, collaborative working and public service delivery) from the KnowHow NonProfit site and turned them into interactive wiki’s. Allowing any user to edit existing material and create their own. We hope that this will encourage collaboration and make it easy for anyone to publish their knowledge online, exposing hidden knowledge to the rest of the sector.

What is a wiki?

A wiki is a more sophisticated collaborative editor, not just restricted to editing single documents. It is a type of website that allows users to easily add or remove pages. It allows existing pages to be edited and links between pages to be created. It is essentially a website that can be changed by those who visit it.

Different options exist to control who can do what. At one extreme some wikis allow anyone to edit what they find without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing. In essence, a wiki is a simplification of the process of creating web pages combined with a system that records each individual change that occurs over time, so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states.

It is now becoming more common for wikis to be created and edited by a few people (such as the American Flu Wiki).

Pros

• Instant editing, easy to keep up-to-date, mistakes can be easily corrected by rolling back to an earlier verions of the page
• Minimal training needed to add and edit pages

Cons

• Editing a wiki is often not as simple as a normal word processor and may have more limitations
• If a completely open wiki is used, it must be moderated or managed by an editor

Beware

• Users need to overcome barrier of being able to edit as well as read a web-page
• Wikis need animation to foster collaboration. For new users, the ability to edit a web page directly is unnatural and can be a barrier

Case-study on a wiki: ladder4learning

ladder4learning promotes “learning” for people and organisations in the community and voluntary sector in South East England. Ladder4learning have developed a Jargon Buster Wiki because they felt the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) is guilty of using an overwhelming range of inaccessible terms and acronyms.

The rapidly changing nature of the sector means that new initiatives and their corresponding terms come and go and it can be very hard to keep up-to-date with the latest jargon and acronyms. While a number of Jargon Busters exist, they rapidly become outdated. A wiki allows for rapid and regular updating by anyone in the VCS and this enables a collaborative approach on a national scale.

Users can register as members of the wiki, or they can use the wiki as a guest and remain anonymous. The success of this collaboration can be seen by the fact that the majority of definitions are added to and edited by people and groups outside ladder4learning

They are aware that with such collaborative, free-use tools there is always the potential for abuse of the site, for example the addition of inappropriate words and definitions. To date, this has not been an issue with this Wiki.

View the full case study

Further reading: Wikipedia