May 07, 2008
Wiki Examples for Discussion
Each of these wikis is intriguing either for illustrating the range of applications for wikis in education, the range of other technologies that can be combined and used in wikis, or some of the economically intriguing professional applications of wikis.
Slideshow is made with SlideFlickr.
Links for most of the wikis shown are at:
http://del.icio.us/rosefirerising/wikis+es08
Posted by pfa at 09:43 PM | Comments (0)
May 21, 2007
Wiki Search Engine: Qwika
Wikis have advantages and disadvantages. In my mind, as long as you remember to preserve a healthy scepticism about ANY source, print or electronic, the advantages of wikis will far outweigh the concerns. In that context, it can be really handy to search wikis for information, tips, and sources that people really focused on a topic consider to be the best on that topic. You can do this in Google, with some tricky approaches.
For example, let's say you want information on diabetes.
I can search the disease term with the term "wiki", like this.
Google: diabetes wiki
The results are fairly good, but it includes blog entries and web pages that mention wikis, as well as wikis themselves, and has over a million hits. I want to make it a little more focused.
Here is a search where I've put the disease term in with a special Google command (inurl) to search for the word WIKI anywhere in a URL.
Google: diabetes inurl:wiki
The results are fairly good, and it has dropped the results down to under 200,000, but has many of the same problems as the earlier search. Better, but could still be better yet.
Enter Qwika. Wouldn't it be nice to have a search engine that just searches the content of wikis proper? Well now we do.
Qwika: http://www.qwika.com/
Again, not a perfect search. Qwika searches just over 1000 wikis. The results have some problems with ranking, where it does not group results from the same source nor does it rank by quality or credibility of the source. That meant my Qwika search on diabetes listed results beginning with a Wikipedia parody, and then continued with a long list of results from various permutations of Wikipedia itself. Still, it brought the total number of results to under 600 -- much, much less than the other searches, making it more reasonable to explore the results in greater depth.
Posted by pfa at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)