I started contributing to Wikipedia way back in 2001, when it was on much older crufty software and took up hardly any disk space at all; the rules then were still in flux and one of the ones you could trot out in a disagreement was “ignore all rules.” Somewhere along the line I lost enthusiasm for it, and it hasn’t returned as various scandals have surfaced, though I do still contribute occasionally.

One of my most recent edits was, I thought, perfectly relevant to the article, but was unceremoniously reverted with a dismissive summary. It seems that bureaucracy has grown up around what was once a freewheeling community that still got things done. Oh well.

All this is by way of saying that I’m familiar with wikis and could, once again, skim the readings. Yippee.

Yesterday our department head suggested that we set up a wiki for things relevant to what Youth Services is and does. So I set one up, added a few pages to it, and invited others to join and contribute. So far the results are modest, but that’s how anything starts. (As Paul Kelly says, “from little things big things grow.”) ^__^

Wikis are a perfect medium for collaborative editing, and of course the edit histories are useful for the occasional vandals (and if you have an invitation-only wiki, there’s little reason to worry about vandalism in the first place).

Library for Life had some interesting pages, not least one on Finding living people, and their collection of links to local events and venues must be a great resource for people in the area (and an idea ripe for pilfering).

I liked the reviews on BookLoversWiki, which was set up as part of a summer reading program in 2006 (there are not many reviews–the community has abandoned the wiki in favor of adding reviews directly into their catalog). I’m not convinced, though, that a wiki is the best way to store reviews: there’s no way to limit edits to correction of typos (even a three character deletion–no –can substantially change a review’s meaning). And I’m not sure that anyone would feel so attached to the reviews that they’d watch them to make sure that the content isn’t substantially changed. I think that wikis, designed for collaborative editing, are probably not so good for things which people don’t want to collaborate on.

In short: I like the idea of the use of wikis in libraries, mostly for collection of formatted and organized data–booklists, lists of links.

My thoughts on the reliability of information on Wikipedia? How long do you want to read? How long would I want to talk? It’s not an easy question–tied to it are questions of assumption of authority and the problem of information sources and information assessment in general. I’m not interested in writing a dissertation. Wikipedia is probably not a bad place to start research. Of course it’s not completely reliable, but no information source is. And I’m skeptical of the assumption that information is more reliable simply because it comes inside two covers with a pretty binding.