Wiki Facilitates Collaboration at Ball State University Libraries

With the deployment of a new wiki, University Libraries personnel have a new tool at their disposal for communication and collaboration.

A wiki is a website that allows its visitors to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change its content. Because of their ease of use and effectiveness for collaboration, wikis have been growing in popularity over the last decade as a tool for developing public and private knowledge bases. Wikipedia, one of the most popular public wikis, includes more than 1.5 million English-language articles written collaboratively by volunteers over the last six years.

The University Libraries' wiki uses the MediaWiki, a free and open source software package that was originally created for Wikipedia that can scale from a small intranet to a site with millions of hits every day. After creating an account and logging in, users can view or edit any page. No familiarity with website design or HTML is necessary; MediaWiki uses wikitext, a simple, easy-to-learn markup language that simplifies creating content and linking to other pages. Since anyone can edit any page, the software keeps all of the older versions in its database, allowing the users to revert to a previous version in case large mistakes are made.

The University Libraries' wiki was originally set up for Metadata and Digital Initiatives personnel and others involved with the Digital Media Repository. It facilitates collaboration on DMR projects and provides a central location to document procedures, work flows, and standards related to these projects. It has the potential to be used for much more, though. If you would like to try it, you can access the wiki at www.bsu.edu/libraries/wiki. Feel free to create an account and start using it today.