Week 7, Thing 16-Wikis

Having been somewhat familiar with Wikopedia as an example of a wiki, I was delighted to discover that the use and application of wikis has expanded greatly. I liked the idea of using wikis to annotate the catalog giving more depth to the description of a book, this would be so helpful in matching books to readers or purposes. I also liked the idea of a community wiki where all aspects of information about a community could be easily found, updated and edited as necessary. I live in an area where we border another state and county and have 3-4 phonebooks to peruse depending on what direction we may be going; creating a wiki for services local to my area that didn't rely on county or state boundaries would be wonderful! In the library setting, reader's advisory wikis could be terrific as patrons interact with staff and each other. I could see a story program wiki that could be used by programmers to update and change programs on given themes and be able to share them. Working on meeting notes/agendas and collaborative planning of projects would be another library use of wikis. Best of all, I needed to read the Library 2.0 wiki , Librarian's Matterwhere I discovered an entry that outlined all the reasons we as librarians should be pursuing all this "techy stuff" even if we don't think it is relevant. The author was "right on" in her explanation of why learning about all of this is important. My only worry with wikis has been the chance of "bad" information being entered, I was glad to learn that the community using the particular wiki serves to enfore behavioral norms and content. Wikis can be very helpful and useful and I hope to explore more of them.