Week 7 #16

I find it hard to see the point of a lot of these wikis. Wikipedia is a good example of what librarians are here to prevent – the dissemination of maybe wrong/maybe right or downright bad information. One of the things that we stress constantly in helping people use the computers is to find a TRUSTED source. The Wikis for information may or may not be trustworthy. And, the SJCPL seems to me to be totally useless. If you are computer literate enough to navigate through the wiki (for example to get to the tax forms) then you are computer literate enough to simply do a search using a search engine. Why go through more clicking? The Book Lovers Wiki from Princeton is another case in point. How do we know whether the person doing the review even read the book? Many of the reviews sound like cobblings from amazon.com. I think this goes back to what I said earlier; I don’t have time to read things my friends suggest, much less strangers.

I did like the Library Success wiki since it is a specific forum for a specific group to share ideas and we can always stand to look at new ideas. I think a system-wide wiki on ideas for bulletin boards, posters, reference, etc., would be nice except that (as has already been mentioned during the reference meetings) no one has the extra time that would be needed to setup and maintain it. And (as has also been said) each library is different in time, space and money restraints (although I think we all share the not enough of any of the three) as well as in patron demographics so what works at one may not work at another. I can see the point of specific group wikis to share information among a related group but I still don’t see the point of general wikis.