Durham, NC - Acronym creators of the world, you know who you are.

You riddle your sentences with alphabet soup. Your colleagues with less tenure at Duke occasionally stare at you in confusion, trying to make sense of the abbreviated jargon spewing from your lips.

Fortunately, now the Duke community has a resource: the Duke Acronyms wiki (https://wiki.duke.edu/display/Acro).

This "ABC Guide to Duke" can be viewed and edited by any member of the Duke community, allowing employees to post their commonly used acronyms and decode others that they've heard in conversation.

So far, the wiki contains basics, such as CIT (Center for Instructional Technology), DUHS (Duke University Health System), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and L&OD (Learning & Organizational Development).

But its creators in HR (Human Resources) say they hope the list will grow so that Duke Acronyms becomes an increasingly valuable resource for the Duke community.

"Because Duke is such a large organization, it seemed impossible to put together a comprehensive list on our own," said Greg Whitaker, HR web administrator. "That's when we decided to set up a page on Duke Wiki, which would easily allow anyone in the Duke community to add their own acronyms.  Hopefully, once enough people have found the list and added their input, it will be a great reference tool for Duke employees."

Wikis are becoming an increasingly important online collaboration tool for Duke faculty, staff and students. There are currently about 370 wiki spaces set up in Duke Wiki, Duke's free online wiki tool (https://wiki.duke.edu/dashboard.action). They're used for sharing documentation, editing documents, tracking projects, recording meeting minutes and more.

"A wiki provides a fairly user-friendly format for gathering information into one place online," said Richard Outten, OIT senior analyst. "It's mainly a collaborative tool -- a place to collect ideas, thoughts and documentation that should be shared with others."

Because they make documents and information easy to share and even allow online comments and discussion, wikis are also becoming a valuable tool for the classroom. For a blog post on how to incorporate wikis in teaching, visit the Center for Instructional Technology's "Teaching with a wiki."

Duke Wiki is open to all faculty, staff and students at Duke. To create a wiki for a project or group, submit a space request online.