wikis

It seems to me that the democratic aspect of wikis may have evolved - with group wikis often now requiring passwords etc to comment. This seems to make many of them seem like a middle ground between blogs and websites/intranet.
They give us another communication tool - both within the organisation and for our customers to use when communicating with us and each other. They may even build community spirit, if used effectively.
Our Footprints of Manukau online exhibition could have, I imagine, been run through a wiki rather than website and related flickr account. This would have allowed for closer connections between the organisation's information and the community input. In many ways it works like a wiki, allowing for comments to add to the pool of knowledge but it makes a distinction between official and unofficial comments. There are obviously pluses and minuses with each option.
Wikis are definitely useful for a number of library activities including, I was thrilled to see, entire staff training programmes.
I always imagined that there was an opportunity for staff to feed into a knowledge pool re: courses/conferences they have attended, so staff members could quickly research staff comments prior to enrolling on a course they are unsure about. But a wiki would take it another step, making it easy to build quite a lot of information on individual courses and subject areas, as well as link to relevant sites etc.
Wikis require trust in the people allowed to contribute - and that is the key to their strength and weakness - they are only as useful as the contributions.