But let me tell you what I found. I tried looking for zoo-specific wikis. I found the promising American Zoo Wiki, which is supposed to have pages on all the zoos in America. It has one. The Central Park Zoo's entry says simply, "The Central Park Zoo is a zoo in New York City's Central Park. The zoo started out as a menagerie for exotic animal gifts."
Zoo Wiki also looked promising. It is a "collaborative animal archive wiki" with a bunch of entries, each on one species of animal. Unfortunately, the entries are all very small, including only the taxonimic information, the size of the animal, the continent where that animal can be found, and a drawing of the animal. As far as I can tell, there is only one contributor to the site, so it's not much of a wiki. The wiki manager also has a blog on her wiki, and it details her trials and tribulations. It is pretty disheartening - she starts out all excited for her lovely wiki, but she slowly has to shut down access to it because of intense and persistent spamming. As of May 2nd, she had to remove even the ability to become a member of the wiki because fake users were being set up with the purpose of vandalizing her blog. Now, if you want to be a member of her wiki, you have to contact her directly.
I got really excited when I found Zoo World Wiki. It had a bunch of entries, and the description on the main page started, "Hey, Zookeepers!" But it turns out that this is a wiki about a Facebook game called Zoo World. Apparently I'm not the only one frustrated: one of the comments under the Overview section was from "Angelsinthewindow": "Damnit! I thought this was for the zoo world on FACEBOOK! darn it all."
I also looked through Wikipedia's list of active wikis. The active wiki entry is a little annoying because all the links simply go to the Wikipedia entry on that wiki, as opposed to linking directly to the wiki in question. But I can copy and paste into Google with the best of 'em, so I followed up on interesting looking wikis for a while. I did manage to find some good wikis here. One that sounded intriguing was Whole Wheat Radio, which is a indie music-streaming website with an associated wiki. Interesting stuff (and good music!), although it was hard to search if you didn't already know a fair amount about Indie musicians. Another good wiki is the International Music Score Library - a library of public domain music scores for the use of all. I don't have much need for musical scores myself, but the wiki struck me as useful, at the very least.
I also found A Million Penguins, an experiment by Penguin Publishing to write a wiki novel. Within five paragraphs, I confirmed that it is indeed not a good idea to write a novel by committee. It's a mildly entertaining read if you go for post-modern random oddness. Are they in an internet cafe, or on the beach? And why is the walrus so intent on his painting? Very strange.
So, at the end of my searching, I've come to the conclusion that wikis may be a great collaborative tool, but I'm not sure how useful it is to collaborate with EVERYONE out there. If a wiki is just put out there in cyberspace, as the poor managers of Zoo Wiki and American Zoo Wiki learned, you're likely to either be spammed to death, or ignored. I think wikis should be used in more specific applications. My first idea for a wiki was an Enrichment Wiki for zookeepers. The wiki could be arranged by animal (or perhaps by type of animal) and zookeepers could post enrichment ideas they've had success with. There is something like this already, a database maintained by the Fort Worth Zoo. You can submit items to the database, but you have to be an approved member to actually post things. In a wiki, keepers could discuss what does and doesn't work, safety issues, etc. It would be more of a living document.
There could also be wikis on the husbandry of some difficult-to-care for animals, to allow the the subset of the zoo community involved in the species in question to develop best practices collaboratively. Or a wiki for zoo educators. There are many possibilities, but I think the wiki should be restricted to a specific population. The wiki also needs to be advertised to the appropriate audience. The enrichment wiki could be presented in the zookeeper's professional publication, Animal Keeper's Forum. The husbandry wikis could be supported through AZA's Conservation Committees. Etc, etc.
Wikis are collaborative tools, so the idea that you need a group to collaborate with might be completely obvious. With Wikipedia being the most well-known wiki, however, I do think a lot of people skip that first step. So, this is what I've learned: gather your group together first. THEN collaborate.
I know. I'm brilliant.
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