Are wikis an effective means of communication? Why or why not? Why does it matter?
By looking at this question, the first thing I did is to identify the term “Effective”. According to the Longman-Dictionary of Contemporary English (http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/effective ), the word “effective” generally means “successful, and working in the way that was intended”. It is hard for me to answer this question, because I am in a pros-and-cons situation. It depends on the role we are playing while using this service, from academic point of view, or non-academically. The term “effective” act differently.
As a non-academic user of wikis, fast and easy may consider as effective. Wikis is fast because whenever you type in question, the first site that comes up with the most solutions will always from wikis. Its wording is simple, information are well-defined according by the use of different subjects. Just like the word “effectiveness”, in wikis you get different meanings such as from mathematics perspective, as well as from medicine, management’s perspective and etc. but back to the Longman-Dictionary of Contemporary English, it just simply tells you that, the word “effectiveness” is a noun, which is not enough information for us to know. Secondly, Wikis is now a universal service, because it offers in different languages. While there is no language restriction, more and more people are benefited from Wikis. The use of Wikis will also save lots of time, which we will consider as effective. People may even make friends by contributing the site together. This is good because we can expand the social network while working on wikis.
But on the other hand, from a student perspective, wikis are not the kind of academic resources we can use as references. Since people around the world have equal opportunity to contribute or edit the articles. They may edit based on personal opinion, or from what they have heard from others, therefore no sources can be found. Some people may not edit the material seriously and provide the fake information on it and audiences will never get a chance to notice about if the information is real or not.
In conclusion, I think there will not be an exact answer for this question.
I understand why you say that the answer depends on which aspect you're looking at. In my opinion, I think wikis are effective means of communication because they allow dynamic information sharing and it is easily accessible and convenient for everyone. They are not only allowed to read from it but also allowed to write and edit it. There are no limitations to when or what you can access, it is like a site of knowledge exchange. Therefore, I interpret it as effective.
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