The Wiki: 506 and Beyond

Partially because adding to a wiki is like adding to an encyclopedia, it took me a while to appreciate the idea of the wiki; the credibility of such a collaborative work runs contrary to the traditional sense of authorship. But what I have come to love about wikis (a little too late for our 506 wiki) is the focus on substance over recognition. Wikis are not void of author recognition, but the emphasis is not on who supplied the information but the information itself. Considering that wikis can be constantly updated by anyone, and they are free, encyclopedia sets have become obsolete. Back to our 506 wiki, another problem I had was that our interests are so diverse that instead having a dozen heavily edited pages, we have a fifty pages that are hardly edited. Although I did not get much out of our course wiki, I did acquire a greater appreciation for wikipedia; I am convinced that it is a great first step for research in virtually any field. Wikis simply accumulate more information and link to more information that an encyclopedia set ever could.