Reflection on Wiki experience

The last days of EIR was a rush because of procrastination. :(:(

Anyway, I still have to reflect on my Wiki experience. I believe that the most significant and at the same time challenging experience in doing Wikis has to be locating relevant information, and than evaluate and extract key information out of seamlessly endless walls of text. Most text I used as my research materials contain many miscellaneous or unwanted information that I have to weed out before posting the refined version on Wiki so that other users can have a better experience in gaining knowledge of my topic. Thus, this reflects on how important the community spirit in maintaining Wikis.

Maintaining Wikis is a monstrous job for an individual, especially for a extensive topic with many sub-topics. With the community help, the quality of Wikis will increase as users detect and correct mistakes that I subconsciously made, or to further expand on it, making it more comprehensive. It will greatly simplify the process of gathering information from different sources if it is done in a community, rather than as a individual, and consolidate and update the Wiki. To achieve this, community spirit, especially personal attitudes towards sharing knowledge are essential. I believe that one advantage that Wikis have is that it is constantly under community scrutiny, and thus personal biasness and agenda are corrected.

One advice I will give to the next batch of students is to collaborate well with each other to maintain high quality material. The keyword is synergy. It's not a case of x plus x but rather x times x, and the results are vastly separate extreme results. work well with each other, and you will achieve so much more than what you can individually. This will not only apply to maintaining Wikis, but also future project works too.

Like it or not, Wikis is one of the best source of information available on the web that is probably the least biased due to its nature. For my course, I would have to use Wikis to obtain information that does not have agendas other than purely to inform, so that I can cross reference with information from other sources such as printed media. This is important as a printed media maybe produced with a intent to promote a certain agenda or to advertise a product, thus, certain facts would be inaccurate. Unless something else can provide a better balanced source of information than Wikis, I think I stick with using Wikis.