What is a Wiki?

Wiki is one of my favourite student collaboration tools. The word 'Wiki' comes from the Hawaiian language and means quick or fast. The word Wiki entered the Oxford English Dictionary in early 2007 having been used to describe a particular sort of online editable website for some years prior to this.

In the IT world, a Wiki is a way to make a collaborative website very quickly and extremely easily. You require minimal technical know how to do it and all you need is an internet connection and a web browser. You do not require any special software.

Wikispaces is one of the many places that you can create a Wiki. It is free and very easy to use. Now that you know this, the next time that your child comes home with a shared (or individual) project to do, making it on a Wiki could be one of the suggestions that you make.

If you would like to learn more about Wiki's then here are a few links

• Wiki for collaborative projects
• Wikipedia article about Wiki

How should students use Wikipedia?

Before we can say how they should use it, perhaps we need to ask if it is OK to use it.

Can we trust Wikipedia?

There have been a couple of independent studies looking at the accuracy of Wikipedia. There was one in 2005 that involved a survey by the science journal ‘Nature’. They found that the science entries in the volunteer written, online encyclopedia Wikipedia were "not markedly less accurate" than those found in Encyclopaedia Britannica. More recently, Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems, found that experts rate articles in their sphere of expertise more highly than non-experts in the filed do.

One of the features of Wikipedia is that it is peer published. Anyone can help with creating content and so it is created very quickly and kept up to date. It is a case of many hands making light work. This would be extremely difficult to do using the old traditional methods. A good recent example of this is the documentation of the ‘Virginia Tech massacre’. This event occurred on 16^th April and it was also on 16^th April that a page in Wikipedia was created. Go and have a look at it now.

How should students and teachers use Wikipedia?

• Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for research

• Be aware that sometimes people insert wrong information but it is generally cleaned up quickly.

• You should always check a second source and usually Wikipedia will tell you where to find other sources

• Where there might be some question of the accuracy of a page, Wikipedia will usually highlight that. Going to the discussion link for that page will help understand the dispute and is often very informative.