Thing 22 -- Create a Wiki

I was very excited to create a wiki. I created one to record my family's history. The wiki link is http://caplerhistory.wikispaces.com/. My wiki is called Capler Family History Wiki (Capler is my maiden name). I got the idea after watching the Common Craft video in Thing 21 about wikis. I've always wanted to try to collect the various stories about my deceased parents and stories about my family. I created the wiki and made pages for each of my brothers, sisters, and nieces to add their information. I also made a page for everyone to include stories they remember about my parents. I love the idea that we can all go to one place to add our stories and that everyone can then add to or edit the story. The best part is that it will all be in one spot. I uploaded a picture of each person on his/her page. On the home page I included some instruction on wikis by including a link to the howstuffworks.com article on wikis and a link to the Common Crafts video on wikis. It was fun and pretty easy to create the wiki.

I think a wiki is appropriate for this very type of collaborative thing that I'm doing in my wiki. A blog, on the other hand, is not really collaborative. One person is writing their thoughts and stories. Others can make comments, but they can't edit what the original person wrote in the blog. Wikis, then, are good when you want several users to be able to edit the same document, whereas a blog is best suited for one individual doing the writing and others reading and just commenting on what is written.