The Guardian covers wikis in the UK state sector

by Randy Metcalfe on 7 February 2006

Archived This page has been archived. Its content will not be updated. Further details of our archive policy.

Introduction

An article in the Guardian has covered the increasing use of wikis in the state sector. Wikis allow web users to write as well as read pages online. They are often used as tools for lowering the barriers to participation, enabling those with an interest to not only participate in a discussion, but actual alter the documents under discussion. The best-known wiki internationally, Wikipedia, has utilised reader participation to build an encyclopaedia of almost a million articles.

Wikis are also being used in the state sector. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s sponsored e-Innovations Programme wiki is a case in point. OSS Watch is in there as well. The OSS Watch Wiki is one of the first public facing wikis from a JISC-funded service.

OSS Watch has been exploring the use of wikis internally for more than two years. The decision to launch a public wiki was challenging, but the hoped-for benefits for the further and higher education community more than equalled the challenges of facilitating a safe environment for online collaboration.

The Guardian article, Public sector catches wikimania published on 22 February 2006, captured some of what makes wikis exciting. We were delighted to see OSS Watch feature prominently.