Deciding when to use a blog and when to use a wiki for a project depends on the needs of your project. A blog is a website designed to have one or more people post entries on a continuing basis, rather like a journal. A wiki is a website with pages that are easy for people to edit. Many times, anyone at all can edit a wiki, but sometimes wikis are restricted so that only a certain group of people are able to edit the pages.
Wikis are best when there are many people collaborating on one project such as a editing a document or collecting links or information. Blogs are better when a person or group of people need to put information out and have others be able to respond easily to what they have said. For instance, my library is starting a website redesign. While we are interested in everyone’s ideas for the website, the most of the major tasks and decisions fall on one or two people. It is easiest for us to use a blog to post ideas and have people respond in threaded comments than to edit wiki pages. On the other hand, if we were authoring a strategic plan for our website redesign or collecting links to other library websites, a wiki would have been better. (We are actually using del.icio.us to collect links, but that is another lesson.)
The wiki I created for this weeks lesson is (the beginning of) a collection of resources for new medical librarians. Anyone who wishes should feel free to add their favorite sites.
