One of the reasons I’ve been relatively quiet here lately is that I’ve been working on an annotated bibliography project. It was to have been a mid-term project last spring but, as most of you know, I was quite otherwise occupied at mid-term. I chose to survey the existing literature on wikis, and was pleasantly surprised at how much good stuff there is out there already.

While it might seem obvious that a wiki bib should be presented as a wiki, I chose to do it as a blog. There are several reasons:

• First of all, I had to demonstrate single-authorship for the purposes of completing the course. Wikis don’t exactly facilitate this.
• Secondly, I view this project primarily as personal notes for my exams and eventual dissertation. I don’t want anyone else mucking about with my notes. I did, however, want others to be able to respond, and blog comments provide that functionality.
• I wanted it to be easily searchable, and I like the way the MT search engine works. My experience with wiki searches is not so good.

If you’d like to take a look, it’s currently hosted on the UMN UThink servers at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/kenne329/wikibiblio/. There are twenty-five annotations there now. Since this is a public document, I did my best to stick with purely summative annotations, although I’m sure I slipped in a few places. In most cases, I was able to include direct links to the texts discussed, which should make it more useful all-around. If you know of any other wiki literature that isn’t included, feel free to point it out to me. (There are two that I know of at the moment: Cunningham’s The Wiki Way, which I haven’t gotten around to yet, and “Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki, and the Plone Wars: Wiki as PJM and Collaborative Context Tool,” by David Mattison.)