Wikis

I decided to try to find a Wiki suitable for my alma mater's library, Noel Memorial Library at Louisiana State University in Shreveport.  This is somewhat difficult for me. I am not familiar with Wikis, but I have learned about them from the readings in class.  I also have never worked at this library or any other library. I am going into this with what I know about the school and library from being a student and a patron there, and one small interview with a reference librarian for a different project.

I decided on Wetpaint for LSUS based on the standards I could determine would be needed by the school.  First, I decided on a wiki with hosting as opposed to one with software.  While the university tries to stay up to date on technology, they can only update computers and software so often. It seemed that it would be better than to have a wiki with hosting rather than one that needed downloaded software that might eventually not be supported by the university's computers.  Hopefully that is not an incorrect assumption on my part.  I also wanted one with a page history.  Since wikis are publicly editable, to my understanding, it seemed important to have a page history to restore a page from should someone vandalize the page.

Another thing that appealed to me about the Wetpaint page was they have a free version, a premium version, and an ad-free version for educational uses, which I would think NML would fall under.  Wetpaint is also aimed at all types of users, rather than development teams, etc, which is nice to have that option should funding or budget cuts result in someone not necessarily familiar with web development having to run the wiki.  It also has unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth.  I am not sure if limitations would be a problem for this library, but unlimited is always better (or so I would think).  I also liked the option of running the wiki under your own domain and the ability to use corporate branding to change the wiki to match the university's other pages, both of which seemed like a nice option for an academic library.  Another aspect of this wiki  useful for the library was the use of a captcha to keep bots from spamming the wiki. For spam reasons, I also found it useful that Wetpaint offers email notifications for when there are changes made to the page.  Also, I noticed this wiki allows the creation of page templates for pre filling new pages. I do not know all the details of this, but for a somewhat small library it seemed like a nice time saving option.  The ability to have discussion forums was also an option that seemed to be needed for a library that caters to college students.

There are no ads allowed on this wiki, but I do not see that being an issue for an academic library.  Perhaps for a corporation it would be a nice option, but I cannot see it being needed for any library.  Being localized is not an option with this wiki, but that also was something I determined this library did not need. I did notice that Wetpaint does not allow free and open source.  I had a hard time determining if this was something this particular library needs.  However, since it is a somewhat small university library that does not maintain a large web presence, I determined it was something that was not necessary.

Overall, I determined to the best of my abilities that this would be the best wiki for NML to use.  It has all of the needed features for this library along with a few that may or may not be needed.  Most of what it lacks are features that this library should not need.