16. Wikiring

I like the concept of the wiki; harnessing the abilities (and, more importantly the time) of the random people in the world. It appeals to my sense of chaos. Everyone who is interested enough to be looking up a subject will have their own information they can add to the mix, something not thought of by the originator of the article; and if nothing else, when one must refute anothers misinformation, one often needs to reflect on their own ideas.

As a tool for collaboration, wikis are pretty amazing. They combine the ease of communication shown in online forums and listservs with the read-only 'final product' of a web page. As emails fly about, new document versions get passed around and such, it is easy to lose track of what the 'last word' on an issue actually was, and to disseminate that information easily.

And I was always curious as to why our reference desks in Central don't have a book of general knowledge (which are readily available; we have a couple in our collection, even) at the desk. We have Fitch which is along the lines of a wiki, but doesn't seem as easily editable.

There is always in my mind the issue of non-experts and opinionated posts. The consensus of wiki faithful seems to be that the community of contributors will spot and edit obvious misinformation, but does this require a large community of posters? It seems the size of the wiki will scale with the size of the community (a wiki should, perhaps, start small so a large community can expand it as the community requires), but if there are few posters how much time can they spend editing things? Unless editing and publishing rights are enforced, in which case the word 'encyclopedia' come to mind...

But yeah, a library wiki for policy, procedures and such forth would be useful; with editing and posting rights etc it would help to get things standardised across the system. Especially if video posts were allowed.