Video: Wikis in Plain English is an excellent wiki primer

Peter Caputa of WhizSpark and the PC4Media blog and Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Radar write about Lee and Sachi LeFever’s video Wikis in Plain English, which does an excellent job of explaining a wiki in comparison to email. The video uses the scenario of four friends who need to coordinate an event – in this case a camping trip – and demonstrates how, “email is not good at coordinating and organizing a group’s input.” The video goes on to explain how a wiki lets each user edit the text of a web page, and gives the example of the group assembling the supplies they need for the trip by keeping lists of what they have and what they need on the wiki, and editing as they get supplies or think of new things they need.
The video is done in a fun way, with illustrations on a whiteboard and a voiceover narration – a good approach to take for people who might feel intimidated by technology. If you’re fluent in other languages, they’re looking for help translating the video’s subtitles into other languages.