Thoughts+About+Wikis

My Thoughts on Wikis ﻿ Personally, I think that wikis are a fun challenge. It's interesting to work with a website format and to be able to do so much more than just write a paper: you can personalize your wiki much more. However, it's would be a not-fun challenge for people who have a harder time working with computers. It was definitely hard and confusing the first time I made a wiki, but it got easier and it's fun when you're one of the only people in your class who knows how to do a wiki so you're now the go-to person. Wikis are pretty easy from a research standpoint: hyperlinks are much more painless than having 5 text supports per paragraph. Bibliographies are also much easier if you're able to put them into a "chapter" in your wiki rather than creating a whole new page that must have specific formatting that's sometimes hard to understand. Another thing that I like about wikis is that I'm able to input videos and pictures. The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" really comes true. Being able to insert videos and pictures helps to get points across, reinforce the topic, and some things are easier to show rather than to explain: such as how to dance a tarantella.  There are some things that I don't like about wikis. For example; formatting, such as alignment, creating separate paragraphs (there's no way to tab) are sometimes a problem. Pictures also go in random places and I have yet to figure out how to actually click and drag the picture to where I want it to go. I would not recommend wikis for the technologically challenged.  In the end, I think that wikis are a very good way to look at and research a topic: it's unique and enables to do lots of different things, such as pictures and videos, that you wouldn't be able to do in a regular research paper.