in which everyone finally starts to get wikis

So I went to Internet Librarian 2004.  And I was like, where's the organized blogging?  Where's the consensus conference tag?  Where's the wiki?  This is what happens when you send an Internet and Computer Science geek to a library conference.

So I made my own:
Technorati IL2004
My blogging of IL2004
My Kinja thing (which will now be filled with hopelessly non-IL2004 posts) http://kinja.com/user/netlib2004/
A wiki il2004.xwiki.com

Anyway, the good news is that now apparently everyone is all oh I get it.

My Furl is overflowing with Wiki-licious info from today and the recent past.

I have also decided to address this library conference consensus tag issue by making a wiki page.
UPDATE 2005-05-03: First I had to decide where to host the wiki.

Here's what I tried before I decided on SeedWiki:
* XWiki is quite confusing to set permissions for.
* JotSpot is just as bad.  Permissions can only get more restrictive for child pages.  Additionally, it's not clear how it deals with edit collisions.  If I access a page as "guest" and then exit, when I got in again it tells me guest has a lock on the page, and asks if I want to break the lock.  If you've got a lot of unregistered people editing the page at once, it looks like a recipe for disaster.  I am trying to get clarification from JotSpot.  Also, JotSpot doesn't seem to support a page discussion area.
* SeedWiki is quite powerful and has simple permissions management.  I can lock the master page while leaving other pages open.  It is happy to let multiple edits run simultaneously, however, they will overwrite.  That is, if we both have the page open for editing, and first user1 saves then user2 saves, the history will retain user1's changes, but they will be completely replaced in the display by user2's changes.

It's a difficult call.  JotSpot chooses to be pessimistic, and lock the page (with anyone able to break the lock), SeedWiki chooses to be optimistic and leave the page open for editing.

Note: if I'm wrong in any of this analysis, please feel free to comment.

Here's a wiki just for library conference tags.  Going to a conference?  Post the tag.  Disagree?  Discuss.
Anyway, we'll see how the SeedWiki approach goes:

http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/scilib/libraryconferencetag.cfm

It's wide open for editing.  Hopefully there won't be too many edit collisions.
As a bonus, for those of you who can't get enough of folksonomy, SeedWiki supports tagging of pages by registered users.

Here are more library conference wikis:
ALA 2005 Conference Wiki
CLA 2005 Conference Wiki

And blogging about conference wikis:
Library Stuff - Wikis and Blogs at ALA Annual
The Distant Librarian - CLA Calgary Wiki
The Ten Thousand Year Blog - More library wikis put on a human face

In case you're wondering, scilib.jot.com is not me, it's by Binghamton University, who also have a Science Library Blog.  The JotSpot I set up is libwiki.jot.com but it's not currently open for editing.

Comments

[Graham Spencer]

Thanks for your feedback about JotSpot. Sorry you found our permissions model confusing. You are correct that in the current release it only supports narrowing. We have gotten a lot of feedback about this, so we'll support a more flexible model in an upcoming release. Contact us if you're interested in trying an early beta version of that feature when it's ready. WRT page locking: we discourage a strategy where writers overwrite other simultaneous edits, but we do permit it by allowing users to break the lock. So you can either have an optimistic model or a pessimistic model.

Thanks again for the feedback, please contact us with any further questions or concerns.

[Christina Pikas]

My main (and not trivial) complaint with seed wiki is that it locks if you don't update it for 30 days. It's pretty easy to forget to updated it -- they don't send you an e-mail or anything -- just poof! It's there, but you have to pay $20 to get it reinstated.

BTW- is an SLA 2005 wiki forthcoming?

[Luis Arias]

Hi Richard,

I'm sorry that you found XWiki's permission model so confusing ! I bet a good part of that negative experience is due to lack of documentation (although there are some good examples of how to do that right on the permissions page) and our current user interface which although simple, does allow you to set up a site with a complex policy. We will be very happy to announce just such a site with over 25.000 users going online very shortly as things scale up. So please stay in tune at the xwiki blog :

http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/WebHome

To finish up on that topic, please note that you can set rights on the whole wiki, a space (which is simply a namespace), or down on an individual document.

Concerning, multi editing, our current model is similar to SeedWiki but our next release which is also coming up in the next few days includes a locking feature which simply warns you if another user seems to be editing a page, but you can ignore that and fall back to the current model.

Please let me know if I can help you with any of those issues and thank you for your feedback. This is very important to us in making XWiki a better platform.