Wiki week

What a chunky project this week - With NO previous wiki experience, I thought I'd take a closer look at Wikipedia. I searched out something I was legitimately interested in and saw an opening for my blossoming and expanding wiki learning. There was a little [needs citation] link next to the mention of an episode from a television series. I thought, ahah, yes, I can add the citation......being a library bod n'all so this got me interested in finding the ins and outs of citing television media, or any other non print media. I came across an excellent summary page called How to cite film, video and online media from the Media Resource Centre, UC Berkeley Library (where else but Hollywood) which is neatly put together and freely available. This was the easy part. Armed with my 'correct' citation I headed back to Wikiland.

After creating an account I read the 'getting started' pages. I have to say, a citation was not a great place to start my editing life on Wikipedia. The citation guide pages are really dense and I don't know HTML language so more time is needed to explore formatting. Anyhow, I did the edit and saved the citation which is 'accurate' but perhaps wiki won't be happy with the style of it - what's missing is internal and external linking. Perhaps even a Reference section at the bottom of the page would have been a better solution. Hopefully someone will see it and Edit my Edit. (name of my next band)

I can see that groups of people will gather in different sections of Wikipedia much like communities form around any common factors in the physical world. For students of any particular subject who share learning objectives, I can see how wikis would be a great way to pool high quality information and leave it there for access by future students. Because the style and nature of content follows the authors interests who are the audience and participants at the same time, a wiki is likely to remain relevant and useful for a longer period of time than perhaps a web site or a text book. I don't see wikis replacing these, just supplementing them with much faster and relevant access, and that's the hook.

Bring on HTML FREE Wikis please.