Thing 10 - Wikis

I love the concept of wiki's. There is something about the idea of people writing collaboratively and synergisitcally that really appeals to me. Realistically, I probably would have difficulty giving up control over any wiki I started, except to a small group. I think that you have to have a belief in the basic goodness and intelligence of people to unabashedly embrace the concept.
I have a son who reads Wikipedia the way that I used to read the encyclopedia, and in my own perusals I have not come across much that I thought was misleading or incorrect. People tell me that Wikipedia is the place to go for articles on technology and the Internet. All that being said, I once saw a student deliberately vandalizing an article on minerals that he should have been getting information from, so I know that that kind of activity also happens. Rather than a banning of Wikipedia, I would rather see teachers (and media specialists) emphasizing the need for a variety of resources in a variety of formats when students are involved in research.
I would like to see the students and larger community in our district do a town history or school history wiki. The public library could get involved along with the nursing home. Another possibility would be something like the Princeton Review wiki. Students could post book reviews under genre sections or grade level sections.
I really enjoyed the Albany County Public Library wiki--not because I would like to do one like that, but because I was impressed by how useful it appeared to be and by how well documented their training procedures seemed to be. I also visited the Blogging Libraries wiki. Of the six wiki's that I clicked on, 3 were current, 2 were not available, and 2 had no recent posts. It would be nice to have some sort of rating system, or at least a date when the last post was made so that you would know which blogs were likely to be interesting to you. Otherwise, it seemed like kind of a waste of time.
I edited the 23 Things on a Stick wiki. It was easy to edit, and I enjoyed reading the previous edits, but it might have benefited from having some sort of organizational format developed before the editing began.