When I live my dream - Wikis

My wiki

I've been having a lot of fun with wikis. I have my own web site that I put together many years ago, however I haven't updated it too much recently as it is very labour intensive. Now I'm thinking of ditching it and replacing it with a wiki which not only I, but my friends can help me maintain. I'm not sure if I want to let everyone play around with it yet.

At the moment, the only wiki I regularly use is a private one that my wife, a friend and myself use to help us organise our pending overseas trip. Just like the camping mob who used a wiki instead of email to plan their trip, we have found the wiki is the only practical way to do this when there are multiple people involved.

I started with a Wordpro spreadsheet that had the calendar on it, but had to convert it to a PDF so my friend could read it on his computer. He's email me changes and I'd add them then convert it and send it back to him. It was impossible to keep track of the emails too as they all had different subjects.

Our wiki has a number of pages linking off from the calendar. When there are flights involved, we click on the link to get to the flight page with more links to airports and the appropriate aircraft so we can view seating plans. For each city we've listed things we want to see or do with links to websites. There's discussion boards on each page which we use instead of emails. Even the emails from travel agents with quotes are uploaded onto a discussion board. I just can't imagine how we could plan this holiday without the wiki.

Library wikis

Some of the library wikis I have found have impressed me. I particularly liked the SJCPL subject guides wiki. Our reference links page is maintained by the council so it is hard to update, but this one would be so easy to maintain, add to and update links by any of the library staff.

Due to the council controlling our website which makes it hard to add or change anything, I'd love to have a wiki attached to our site where we could update library news regularly. We'd be able to promote our collections and activities.

Wikipedia

I looked up my suburb on Wikipedia> There is a very good and comprehensive article already there. I did find an error though. It mentioned that my locality was subdivided in the 1800s and there are now three streets in the subdivision still existing. There are really only two, and one of the named streets never existed in our area! It was very easy to edit the entry. Only took a few seconds to do and it is all correct now.