Week 13 Reading Notes

Sharing + Collaboration = Wiki

Patrons will benefit greatly from the use of wikis in the library.  Finding a way to share information and form a community which can enhance that knowledge in a collaborative process is a good solution; making the process to create a wiki is great and defining practical uses is best.  Allan’s article discusses that wikis can help to keep track of reference classes, assess databases and offer accessible library instruction.  The days of finding outdated and incorrect information will soon be a thing of the past due as wikis improve efficiency and productivity.   

Tag you’re it!

Social tagging has created a wonderfully collaborative environment in which “ordinary folks” have the opportunity to influence the quality of information that users retrieve.   Given that many people use the internet to conduct research, tagging helps to uncover information that would otherwise go unnoticed.  Arch’s article mentions how a social tagging site is relatively easy to fill with content and continue to grow as more people contribute to the information it contains.  Given the advantage of these “ordinary folks” tagging information there is still a bit of peril.  Concerns about spagging are valid and can be minimized by careful monitoring.  Another disadvantage to social tagging is a lack of established vocabulary and therefore may make searching and retrieving more difficult if a program isn’t designed to compensate for slight variances in language.

Totally Rad, man.

Watching Jimmy Wales speak about Wikipedia was inspiring.  Beginning with the idea that everyone on the planet should have free access to the sum of human knowledge, Wikipedia is well on its way to making that possible.  It is interesting that the people who are making that possible are mostly a dedicated core of volunteers and the monthly budget is basically $5000 for broadband access.  Despite the anonymity that the internet provides, only 18% of the edits to Wikipedia pages are made by anonymous users.  Wikipedia started as a truly radical idea but Wales describes that the passion for the quality of the work far exceeds the process used to generate it and now Wikipedia is nearly as ubiquitous as water.