Thing 16- Wikis

Interesting things about wikis?: a wide audience can be reached- beyond the scope of what an organizer might imagine, and input can come from both expected and unexpected sources. For the library world all of the applications I sampled are exciting: pathfinders, book reviews, best practices, editing articles, conference information.
I particularly liked the Library Success: a best practices Wiki- I'm one who prefers control, so I noticed this site had put up a number of links to make it transparent to me- There was a list of users, and an easy-to-find link to recent changes. It also had an RSS feed, which is a great way to keep up professionally in a specific area of interest and to share one's own experience along the way. I noticed particularly the links in the category Looking for a job: a huge concern in this era of budget cuts and layoffs. I thought the conferences wiki a good idea for a specific event. I also looked at Merlin's links and found there is a link to Montgomery County's Shhout out as well as good links to wiki software. The ability for library users to add book review information a la Amazon.com is exciting- especially as we librarians are becoming more time-limited: as long as there is adequate control to monitor for inappropriate comments. The possibility of collaborative editing of documents is also compelling, especially with the budget downturn, although the primary utility would be to confine it to in-house collaboration. At the administrative level , however, a wiki which would allow a library system to merge it's information with other systems might have some collaborative advantage. I guess Merlin could be a site for that. The use of wikis for pathfinders leaves me a bit ambivalent, as I am with wikipedia- the potential is there for a lot of great information to be added, but the policing of accuracy is vitally important in the library field and not to be jeopardized or we lose our credibility. The pathfinder site I looked at required users to register- I don't know to what extent that helps with content integrity. I guess one can connect wikis to social networking sites also, which should increase their visibility.
This seems like an application that will keep growing and adapting.