This video is part of an series developed by CommonCraft that attempt to explain new technologies in simple terms.

MediaWiki is the application used by Wikipedia.  Middlebury College has an instance of MediaWiki available for the Middlebury College users.  Many sections of our instance of MediaWiki can be added to and edited by anyone with a Middlebury College user account.  Other sections of the site are limited to particular groups at Middlebury. 

MediaWiki is the best application to use for large wikis that are meant to be edited by many people.  Library and Information Services (LIS) maintains a number of wikis including those for Educational Technology, Collection Management and Helpdesk.

To contribute to any of these wikis, Do the following:

1. Log in to Middlebury’s MediaWiki instance
2. Go to one of the pages, categories, wikis you are interested in
3. Click on the discussion or edit tab

For more information on MediaWiki at Middlebury, see: LIS > MediaWiki

WordPress has support for post and page versioning and keeps track of when others link to your blog.  WordPress also allows you to define roles for various collaborators including Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor and Administrator.  Thus certain collaborators may participate by posting comments, others by posting blog entries.  Still others may be editors or administrators of the entire blog.

Segue supports many of the basic wiki features including content versioning and wiki linking.

Segue is a good application to use small wikis or wikis whose content would benefit from being organized into sections and pages.  As well, Segue is good when you want to restrict collaborative editing to a particular group of users.  In a given Segue site it is possible to allows other users to edit only portions of the site.

Note: Segue will be phased out over the next year or so.  That said, we will be offering migration tools to help move sites created in Segue to other platforms. For more information, see: Segue from Segue

Google Docs is emerging as a well-designed document collaboration platform.  Google Docs allows you to create formated text documents, spreadsheets and presentations with features similar to Microsoft Office or Apple iWorks or OpenOffice.

What distinguishes Google Docs from these other applications is that it is completely online and very easy to allow others to view and edit your documents. 

If you would like to request a Middlebury Google account, write to gadmin@middlebury.edu. When you do, you’ll receive a welcome email with a temporary password and instructions for getting started.