The Wiki Presentation

I had to to give a presentation on wikis today at work.  All about them.  What they are, how they work, who uses them, how people can make them and so on.  I thought that the best way to do the presentation was to actually make a wiki about wikis (instead of doing a Power Point or something similar).  For the presentation I chose to use Wetpaint which I think worked really well for the audience that, especially when I invited them to login and make edits to the wiki.  Wetpaint has a pretty user friendly interface and is completely free 9which does mean you’ll have to deal with some ads) and I would suggest it to anybody who would like to try playing around with wikis.

In personal exeperience I think that PBWiki provides a bit more quality, especially for the slightly more advanced user.  PBWiki is where I first encountered using a wiki (well besides looking stuff up on Wikipedia, but I’ve never contributed to the open encyclopedia).  Senior year in college we used PBWiki in my Advanced Technical  Communications class as a place to generate ideas but also to manage a lot of the work that we were doing.  It was great!

I like wikis and I really wish that I could find more practical uses for them on a regular basis.  I have my own personal PBWiki that I occasionally use as a kind of brainstorming site.  I’ve also got the Wetpaint wiki that I used for today’s presentation.  It was encouraging to here our director voice serious interest in the use of a wiki after the presentation and say that she would really like to possibly see them used by staff in the future.  I think that would be awesome.

Anyway, it was fun getting to show some folks some cool Web 2.0 stuff that they had never tried before.  I hope some of them consider experimenting more.

~ by Nathaniel on August 27, 2008.