I'd been using Wikipedia for some time before I actually understood or realized just exactly what a wiki is. Once the buzz started growing about wikis last year I decided to learn a little more about them by taking the SirsiDynix webinar on wikis, 'Wiki: The Ultimate Tool for Online Collaboration', presented by Meredith Farkas, a.k.a. the Queen of Wikis. I'd highly recommend this archived presentation:
http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.com/seminar_page.php?sid=66
Wikis differ from websites in that they put the power into the hands of the people. Instead of having to go through one technical gatekeeper at your organization to get something added to the website, you or your co-worker can simply make the post yourselves. This allows you to post information in more timely, effective manner. This is also one of the dangers of a wiki - depending on the type of wiki you choose (and there are many to choose from!), unknown persons can post just about anything they'd like to your site. It seems a lot of libraries are finding inventive ways to use them - staff intranets are a particularly good way to use them, in my opinion. The Allegany County Library System created a wiki to help coordinate one of its grants and could be easily accessed and used by all members of the grant team.
Another great feature of wikis is that you don't really have to know code to post to a wiki. You can just use an interface that looks very similar to a word processing program to type in your information and post. In any case, this topic seems to be quite hot at the moment and a lot of conferences are using wikis for both pre- and post-conference information sharing. The recent MLA 2007 conference featured a wiki that included podcasts of conference attendees sharing their experiences after taking part in workshops. There seem to be so many creative uses for wikis in libraries and I'm sure we'll see even more clever ideas as time goes on - but they're definitely hot right now!
Oh, and I got to see the Queen of All Wikis, Meredith Farkas, at the Computers in Libraries Conference this past April in D.C....pretty neat.
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