On Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:47:52 -0500, Miksa, Shawne <SMiksa_at_UNT.EDU> wrote:
>This happened in August, but one of my students just clued me in and sent
me this link--
>
>http://www.pcworld.com/article/170826/wikipedia_changes_editing_policy.html
>
>Last Sunday Mr. Johannesen and I were having a "spirited" discussion, a
part of which involved Wikipedia's value. I am happy to see these policy
changes in how Wikipedia is edited and its information validated and I
happily admit my opinion of it was not based on up-to-date information.
>
>This policy change is more proof of how these type of social experiments
mature and realize they must adopt the same sorts of practices that we have
already instituted.
Wikipedia is another one of those areas where my thinking has turned 180
degrees. When it first came out and I realized what it was, I predicted doom
and gloom and the end of civilization, but it turned out that I was wrong.
It has turned out that it is not nearly so bad as I predicted and our
society still seems to be standing (for the moment, and if it topples it
doesn't appear that it will be because of Wikipedia). I suspect that the
changes announced by Wikipedia have more to do with saving Wikipedia from
defending themselves against libel than anything else, since it deals only
with pages about people who are still alive. ("You can't libel the dead") It
seems to me that if Wikipedia were really serious about improving quality,
they would apply this to more articles. That would be a major renunciation
of some of Wikipedia's main assumptions however, so I am not holding my breath.
Nevertheless, I think we all have to face facts: people will use Wikipedia
because it's easy and free and up to date, and people will just ignore
anybody who says, "Don't use Wikipedia!!!" That is, I sincerely *hope*
people ignore such statements and make up their own minds. After all, if
somebody wants information on Italian foreign policy, is it better to look
it up in Wikipedia or in a book published by Cambridge University Press in
1968? Figuring out which sources are and are not appropriate is a very
complicated task and just saying that peer reviewed publications are better
than the rest is far too simplistic to be correct. The public isn't stupid:
they can see for themselves the problems with the "authoritative' media from
the NY Times to the predominance of "peer-review."
Therefore, instead of fighting an eternal, unwinnable war against the evils
of Wikipedia; since we can't shut it down and I don't think we should
anyway, plus people demonstrably like it, we should relate to it in a
different way.
We know Wiipedia is widely used since people have made it one of the most
popular sites on the Internet. I checked and according to Alexa, in the last
3 months, Worldcat got 0.00363% of the users on the web, while Wikipedia got
9.821%. LibraryThing got 0.0253%. (For comparison, Google.com got 34.461%)
These numbers seem to point to the way of a solution.
Why don't librarians go where our users are and try to get involved in
Wikipedia? Facebook is very popular, but I don't believe libraries have had
much luck with institutional Facebook pages. It seems that using Wikipedia
may be better. How could we do it? I'm not sure, but there could be many,
many, many topics where librarians could point to our materials and sites.
We could point to our research guides, or all kinds of resources. Who knows
what people would come up with?
Wikipedia may go along with it in some way and provide us with some kind of
special displays or powers. It seems to me that if we want to raise our
profiles and have a real chance of reaching our users, this is one of the
best ways to do it. Certainly it woul be much more productive for everyone
than the tiresome preaching that people hear, where we are always saying
that "our" stuff is better than "theirs." We could also make the catalog
itself more relevant by allowing users to somehow utilize a Library API for
our records. (I had to bring this back to catalogs!)
In my opinion, these directions would be highly fruitful for incorporating
the library world into the world of our users. It would be cheap and pretty
easy, using all parts of the library since public services would be really
important, while I can imagine IT could experiment with some useful plugins
for Firefox using Wikipedia and library tools.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Mon Oct 26 2009 - 05:47:19 EDT