dO i REALLY WANT TO wiki ?

Create simple web pages
that groups, friends, & families can edit together. . .

I used to think that a wiki was an online encyclopedia that anyone could contribute to. I used to think that all I needed to know about a wiki was to be careful whom (which is, by the way, “a dialectical difference” we older language arts folks still use from time to time) I told that I actually consulted wikipedia out of desperation when I had burning questions other sources couldn’t satisfy. I guess that was a bit like seeing maybe just one side of one tree and not the whole forest?

So what is a wiki? The quote above from http://www.wikispaces.com/ seems to be a place to begin my understanding, my thinking.

But I’m an inquirer through and through, so now I want to know all of this and more.

• Simple compared to what and for whom? (I’ve got to be able to explain—no, teach—this to a group of teachers five days from now.)
  
• If a wiki is a web page, why not just stick to my school web page (School World) or my personal blog (Google’s blogspot)? Why do I need another site, another something else to keep up with? Why would teachers need to be wiki-wise?
  
• OK, maybe the groups, friends, and families can edit together . . . answers my last question? Or maybe not. . . We’ve just begun to set up a summer reading school web page that at least seven of us will be able to edit/monitor, sharing one username and password. I’ve invited my children and the children they married to contribute to my personal blog. Two of them have; the others just lurk. . .
  

I read somewhere—in more than one place, I think—that wikis are democratic. They are in the sense that we all have equal rights to share our thinking in the same space and even to intrude on each other’s thinking via editing something we didn’t post. The anonymity of the process—the casual reader certainly won’t know who wrote what, will he?—reminds me of the anonymity of the voting booth.

So here are my new questions.

• Are wikis about interdependence in lieu of independence?
  
• Are wikis about collaboration in lieu of competition?
  
• Will all voices be heard—is there no way to know?—or will lurking be participation enough?

I guess I should ask whether using wikis as an instructional tools matters at all. But, you know, if I didn’t suspect that it might matter a lot, I wouldn’t have taken you, or even me, on this journey of thought. . .

Your thoughts???