Week 6

Wow week six already, half way there ish by my estimate. I think it's finally cooled down enough that I can write without fear of my computer exploding and or dying some heat related death...

I'll start this week with the Schiff article, I know I've heard at least antidotally about how wikipedia is slightly more accurate than Britannica, and that it has significantly more entries... I've never really noted where this info was coming from and or if the source was accurate... For all I knew it was coming from an entry in wikipedia. With that being said the Schiff article definitely suggests that wikipedia has a significantly higher number of entries and really has no upper ceiling in terms of growth due to the nature of online information. This to me does not necessarily make Wikipedia better.

For instance Schiff notes that the entry on the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict has been edited more than 4000 times, this definitely demonstrates the nature of the information on Wikipedia. That is to say it is often times being created by someone with an agenda or at the very least the neutrality of the information is suspect. I remember reading about a program released this year that made it possible to see who was editing all the posts. Often time it was corporations editing their own posts on Wikipedia. This shifts wikipedia from an encyclopedia from information source to marketing tool.

This is an area touched on in the Farkas article when considering how best to implement a wiki as a librarian. Personally I'm primarily interested in Wikis as they relate to corporate legal libraries, as such there is little use for an open access wiki. A lawyer is probably not interested in information that cannot be guaranteed to be accurate and noted up properly. That's not to say it couldn't be used at all, I'm just saying it might not be useful in a form as envisioned by wikipedia. They could still be used in this type of environment as suggested by Brian Lamb. That is to say in a planning or agenda creating capacity.I also liked them as a tool to collect reference questions and common questions. This is a use where I really like Wikis. I also see them as a means in government libraries of avoiding the tedious steps in the editing of websites. I know during my coop to change anything on the website we had to go through several administrative layers and it was a chore. A wiki could really take some of the headache out of this process in terms of information that changes relatively frequently.

Grant