Periodic Fable

Derek Morrison posted a great description of the difference between the HEA Benchmarking/Pathfinder projects’ blog and wiki on the HEA Pathfinder blog

Although specific to the project, his compare and contrast had a lot of relevance to the general difference between blogs and wikis – so here is his explanation, edited to be more generic:

So why a wiki as well as [a] weblog? The simple answer is that they can complement each other.

First let’s consider the weblog.
A weblog posting is usually presented in reverse chronological order and clearly identifies a single author (or information owner) as the originator of the posting. Readers are usually able to comment on the posting with their comments appearing in chronological sequence beneath the primary posting, i.e. blog readers can respond to but not edit the posting. The single originator + commentary model is perhaps at its most appropriate in a ‘thought leader’ or project management context, i.e. an initiative is facilitated if the source of information, perspectives or stimuli for debate are seen to be coming from a known, perhaps authoritative, and hopefully respected, source.

Now let’s consider the wiki.

The wiki provides an opportunity for collaborative authoring, editing and development of a web information source. The editing rights mean that account holders can modify or enhance any of anyone else’s information with the updated page taking precedence. Although the idea of someone editing or even deleting part of someone else’s intellectual outpourings may make authors with no previous wiki experience nervous, the wiki also provides a version history facility so that it becomes possible to ‘roll back’ to a previous version of the page and so compare the current version with previous work. So the wiki becomes a collaborative development opportunity with versioning built in. In a fully open wiki, malicious defacement or alteration of wiki web pages (as well as spam) can be a problem although an active wiki community soon repairs any such damage. An ‘invitation only’ wiki allows only registered users to author or edit.

So what uses could we put a Wiki to? A couple come to mind. Because a wiki facilitates the collaborative development of thoughts, ideas, concepts, and information then a Wiki could perhaps make a contribution here.
It’s not necessary to try and develop the whole of an online resource, but instead only focus on developing/initiating a small part of it.