My Wikipedia Entry

For one of our activities in the Wiki week we were asked to edit a Wikipedia entry. Not knowing where to start I decided to play it safe and look up my suburb (as it is still a fairly new estate). So I looked up Roxburgh Park and was pleased to see there was enough missing for me to make a (somewhat) valuable contribution to the page as the page is still classified as a 'Start-Class'. Check out the wikipage here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxburgh_Park,_Victoria.

So it's been over a week and no changes have been made to my edit. There are two obvious reasons for this:

1. no body has alerts set up on the page to review changes quickly and therefor no one has noticed my edits
2. my additions have been seen and deemed worthy enough to appear on the page, but either because I am not a registered user or other reasons, no comments have been made on my changes

I suppose I will check on the page and my edits from time to time to see if anything else changes (either to the page overall or to my contributions) and add comments on this post in the event anything does happen.

WWW - the Wonderful World of Wikis

The world of the wiki has always been very strange to me. Other than having referred to Wikipedia (after all it does tend to appear in the top 5 results when googling) for some general information or definition on a vague topic I have never quite understood them.

I generally find them hard to navigate - I guess I show just how old school I am, preferring to use navigation to relying on a search (which often yield nothing useful) and am extremely surprised to discover that they use their own mark-up language! What is with that? They might say that it is supposed to be easier than HTML and blah blah blah BUT I don't get why (a) you'd want to develop and introduce a new language (I mean HTML wasn't that difficult) and (b) why not just create the software with a WYSIWYG editor???

So to broaden my knowledge I decided to do some reading on the subject. Can you believe that some organisations have decided to go with wiki's in place of a CMS to structure, edit and store online information for reference and collaboration? To me that just seems insane. I can understand wanting to use a wiki as a beginning to storing basic knowledge and IP but as the main method for cataloguing all of this, along with documents and other references I find hard to envisage.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying there could never be such an application for them, it's just that I struggle to understand them and exactly how the work and the benefits they provide given my (very) limited knowledge of them. I have considered researching them further for my second WEB101 assignment to help me understand them more and other possible applications, but am not sure if it will result in a less than desirable score on my paper.