Week Six: WIKIS

I found the common craft YouTube clip fantastic on Wikis in Plain English, I like the simple easy going little white papers with texta and the instant click of a finger from a wiki webpage as such to an editing page click save and bam  you have contributed to a wiki….. Pretty simple, I did however find that wikis are a fairly simple web 2.0 tool as they are a collaborative medium that many of us have used, I have used a type with me page, not a wiki as such but a blank canvas for a group of us to collaborate and share and edit ideas on a single page, we used the type with me page for a group assignment and weekly contribution pages, so I found that wikis basically run on the same principle, I enjoyed going into the sandpit and practicing publishing information to Wikipedia, it was a fairly user friendly site that seamlessly made it easy to contribute to the Wikipedia, After reading the information in regards to wikis in the module 2.2 wikis I can understand why Wikipedia is not a great source of academic information for assignments, but really appreciate that anyone can contribute….. I always go to Wikipedia when I need a general understanding of something then usually the references can be used to trace where the authors have retrieved their information from, possibly this source of information then can be used in assignments….. I was interested at the idea of Wikipedia being a communicator of news like the changes in the London bombing, because in the event of a catastrophe Wikipedia is the last place I would sort of think of to edit information to…..

I am yet to contribute a valuable piece of knowledge to Wikipedia but am cast back to a time when I was so engaged in the How I met your mother series that I needed to know who the mother was….. Somehow I thought that the answer had to be out there somewhere, I remember googling who is the mother in HIMYM…. And was directed to Wikipedia where there was an entire page dedicated to the 6 series aired with a rundown of each episode, I spent hours reading all the information….. Now I can see that obviously some one was bored and felt compelled to share their enthusiasm for HIMYM for the world to see, or anybody who was interested in the TV series himym, there was links to the actors, the directors’ you name it. Truly amazing trivial information there for people to see…..