Following Up On The Job Market Wiki Situation

As we near the end of the '09 - '10 job market cycle, I thought it would be worth reassessing the various job-market wikis we've been using. I found that although I didn't initially prefer it (see discussion here), I spent the most time on the phylo wiki this season. I like the color coding and the way jobs with status changes would be moved to the top, which made it easy to tell what was different from one visit to the next. But I also missed the tiered-and-alphabetized structure of the first wiki, which made it much easier to find the schools you are really interested in. Of course, the phylo wiki's ability to create customized RSS feeds sort of solves that problem. But I used those RSS feeds for only a very short period of time; with it there was no point in obsessively refreshing the webpage looking for updates, and I am sick, very sick.

It looks like the Academic Jobs wiki never really caught on, and that people stopped using it altogether in January. It looks like phylo wins.

--Mr. Zero