Assignment-8 Wikis

I have been aware of Wikipedia and the ability to add, change and delete information by its users. I have a concern with the information in Wikis being posted by anyone and everyone. I have been involved in courses where the instructor has said not to use Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information. That just tempted me to use it, and I did find the information useful on Wiki as a starting point which was helpful in bringing my thoughts and ideas together to complete the assignment. I used other authoritative sources to site.

Recently I was looking for information on a rural township community centre and did a Google search and one of my hits was a wiki source. It provided a contact name and phone number of an individuals name in which I recognized. I contacted this person and discovered he was no longer the contact person. Wiki is providing outdated information in cyberspace.

The SJCPL Subject Guides had all the information about their library on a wiki as a pathfinder. As I went to edit one of the articles a page came up which asked for a password and that it could only be edited by SJCPL staff. Good security measure to have in place having the option for only staff to edit particular areas of a wiki. A Wiki on our library site could be a place for patrons to share their likes and dislikes about what they have read or maybe a blog might be more appropriate.

The Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki looks like another impressive information site and once again each person who wants to edit has to confirm e-mail addresses because of vandalism problems. I am not sure where I saw a list of programming ideas for children on Charlotte's Web and other book topics and some blogs about books, etc. There was some great ideas, but now I can't find them :-(. So maybe too much is not a good thing. I could see us sharing ideas among staff, and creating an i-bistro manual for staff which could be edited when changes occur and easily accessible by all staff when in "desperate need" of the correct library procedure.

The Waterloo Way Wiki is part of the big picture "The Waterloo Way-Home of the Waterloo Region Entrepreneur Hall of Fame". It caught my attention because of the featured entrepreneur Mike Lazaridis. I was almost disappointed on the featured entrepreneur's small amount of info compared to others local names of interest, but then realized I had to search deeper for the whole article. All these things to do and remember, where does it end or should I say "begin"! This wiki site is looking for you to share a story or add to one which is already there. This Wiki venture could really bring some great additions of information for the Waterloo Way.

With my own experiences and after looking at the different Wikis which show us a variety of ways to use this tool, I would be cautious if implementing Wiki into our library system.