Blog v Wiki



A wiki can be focused on one subject or a collection of connected topics. It is a collaborative process with the intention of information sharing. There are many authors who can edit and contribute to the wiki. One issue that arises with this is that two people editing at the same time can cause conflict.

A blog typically on one specific subject matter has one overall author expressing their opinions through posts. But it allows people to comment and fosters conversation between people of all walks of life, that are interested in the same subject matter or topic.

Both blogs and wikis are useful new media tools, these technologies allow us to connect with each other more and more. You can start a blog reviewing recipes in Canada and someone in France can comment and share a croissant recipe. Or maybe, a Russian citizen edits the Chernobyl page on Wikipedia, and then perhaps an American historian across the globe decides to edit the page and add a fact that they know. Blogs and Wikis make our world a smaller and more connected place.

One of the readings, Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid, offered a great example of collaboration. The article describes a community that came together to report sightings of fights, drug deals, and suspected crack houses in their neighborhood of Bay Ridge. Them coming together lead to the arrest of a group of drug dealers.


Another one of the readings, How to Use Wikis for Business, said that a wiki can be a replacement for a content management system. I happen to be an intern content manager system administrator, and I actually added a wiki widget to our landing page when users log into the system. This wiki contains various announcements, including tips and tricks and outage notifications. This wiki can be edited by system administrators and specific SMEs or subject matter experts from each department. I think using a wiki as a notification tool is a creative implementation. While I don't think a wiki can completely replace our content management system, I think I will implement the idea from the article to transfer our knowledge base over to the wiki. I believe our growing knowledge base of best practices is better off appearing in our landing page wiki rather than be hidden in some document folders on the system.
Sources:

Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid By MICHAEL WILSON The New York Times June 26, 2008, available at:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/nyregion/26bayridge.html

"How to Use Wikis for Business," by Ezra Goodnoe, Information Week, August 8, 2005, available at:https://www.informationweek.com/how-to-use-wikis-for-business/d/d-id/1034971

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