Kinds of Wikis

Wikis are collaborative.  A wiki is a tool that can be used by a group that not only wants to accomplish something, but also wants its members to add to and edit the collection of ideas and data. 

There are basically four categories of wikis:

• Content-focused wikis
• Process-focused wikis
• Community-focused wikis
• Ease-of-use wikis

Content wikis focus on specific kind of content: cooking, poodles breeding, travel.

Process wikis are used to work in collaboration on a project (which was the original reason the wiki was created.

Community wikis allow a community to gather and share information.  A community can be a city, a neighborhood association, an association (i.e., of fundraising professionals), or a group (i.e, of stay-at-home moms or home-schoolers).

Ease-of-use wikis are wikis that are used to solve problems, or to serve as websites or to share information with its members. (I'll admit that this category is a little vague.)

Here's an interesting education wiki that provides curricula to K-12 educators: www.curriki.org

Here is how Curriki.org describes themselves:

"Curriki, a play on the words 'curriculum' and 'wiki', is a not-for-profit organization that is building the first and only Internet site for Open Source Curriculum (OSC), which will provide universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for grades K-12.

'We are focusing initially on developing an online repository for K-12 curricula in the areas of mathematics, science, technology, reading and language arts, and languages. We want this repository to attract everyone from educators, students and parents, to programmers, instructional designers, authors and public officials throughout the world to contribute or freely access quality learning materials."


And I'll close by introducing the wiki I just created tonight: 611wiki.wikispaces.com 
 Go check it out!  Feel free to make a page. It was incredibly easy. To create a new page click on New Page on the left.  Click Edit to create your page.  Add you content. Then save.  If you want to add content to my page, do so.