#2 Wikis, online appications and suchlike

I've had a look at a good load of the online word-processors but they're not really useful to me as I prefer to write using LaTeX and as a result don't really like WYSIWYG applications. Of the ones I have looked at I think Zoho is by far the best, (and you can actually add LaTeX equations to your documents -- but you can't do the whole article.)

Actually I've just looked around and it looks like MonkeyTex is actually an online Tex processor. Unfortunately there's no details attached as to who runs it or anything so I don't think I'll give it my email and there's no guest thingy so I can't look at it.

I used Zoho writer a bit while I was at college and it was useful for collaborative papers, well the one I did with one other person. But on the whole I think the risks of just leaving your stuff `out there' in the aether is troublesome... mind you I was never working with something that I didn't either not have another copy on another computer or USB thing or just wasn't that fussed if it disappeared.


Wikis

Obviously there's Wikipedia, which I'm trying to avoid as much as possible lately -- to the point of editing my default google search in firefox to remove anything from wikipedia. I find Wikipedia is really useful for anything technical and increasingly rubbish for anything after that. I find myself getting more and more dubious about it as time goes by -- the major turning point was when I started habitually checking the talk page on every page I looked at. In that absence of that strong explicit there is instead the sneaky authority which is the lowest common denominator of essentially whoever can stick out an argument for the longest. Jason Scott has a few good talks about it somewhere on http://ascii.textfiles.com -- actually in general his blog is one of the more interesting library-related things I've seen on the internet and it's not even about libraries but instead about recondite bits of computer history. I think the talks are in the `about' pages or something like that.

In terms of the general use of wikis in libraries. It's probably a good idea, as long as there is a single source of authority for the wiki. Without a single person or group of people who are clearly guiding the direction of the project it's likely to stagnate. With a clear goal it can be incredible useful. My two favourites are the library success wiki and the Digital Research Tools wiki. Both of them have a clear goal and provide a useful service.