The Wide World of Wiki

The more I get to examine the world of wiki, the more amazed I am at how many wiki-things there are. When I played Warcraft, I used to read a wowwiki for my information, but I didn't really think much about it, didn't think about the fact that I could have contributed things to, and didn't think about who was creating it. Wiki is really a vital tool for Web 2.o, it seems to me.


In looking at wikimedia to get a sense of what is out there, I instantly gravitated to the wikibooks. The reason that I instantly went to that one was my love or reading, and oh yeah, I teach literature and writing. I was curious as to what wikibooks would present. In meandering around and clicking on a few different topics, it seems like wikibooks is still in an awkward growth phase. There are several topics that have "textbooks" with a lot of reading and examples, for example, the trig section in math, but then there are several topics, like literature, that seem a little bare. Clicking on some of the genres within topics shows the skeletons that are laid and intended for some of the books, but there obviously needs to be more information filled in by the masses. Maybe when this is done, these books will be useful to the wikiversity members. My favorite section of wikibooks was actually the recipe books. There was a little bit of everything here, including how to boil water and other cooking techniques.

I also looked at wikinews because part of my perusing on the web is always looking at the news, be it local, national, or worldwide, but I'm not sure how I feel about it. It seems like there are so many news outlets available out there that something like wikinews might be lost in the shuffle. What I do find interesting is that people could pool together their knowledge on a news story and provide different viewpoints. I think this could be valuable considering there are many worldwide views that aren't usually brought up in the news we read. My favorite feature on wikinews, by far, was the "Random Article" link that would take you to a random page in the database. This feature helped me realize that it mgiht be good to have somethign like wikinews that would also serve as an archive for things in the news now that we might need to reference or try to find out more about later. Google searches work well, but to be able to search for older news within a site is always great.

Although these were the two wikis that I focused on, I'm intrigued by the others as well and the possibilities that if I were to look at this same menu in a couple of years, there could be double, triple, the number of wiki items.