Wikis Open Source Web 2.0

Wiki to wikis

Wikis are a common collaborative tool; its WYSIWYG interface allows users to create and edit content with ease. Because of this ease of use, they have attracted both praise and concern from librarians.

Wikipedia

The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that attracts millions of readers daily. Wikipedia's popularity has also attracted detractors that make criticisms found in Stacy Schiff's Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? These include: Wikipedia is inaccurate, biased, or unwilling to differentiate truth from theory.  To support her criticism, Schiff cites a Nature magazine article written based on a study comparing Wikipedia with Britannica.

When questioned about the Nature article, Wikipedia responded in a BBC news story stating that yes, there were errors but Nature's staff or anyone else is free to fix them.

Wikipedia's article shows that it is a web 2.0 outgrowth of the "open-source" philosophy summed up by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux that "with enough eyes all bugs [errors] are shallow [and can be easily fixed.]" 

Britannica refused to respond to the article, perhaps unwilling to admit that their encyclopedia had errors.

Because of these perceived shortcomings, many librarians have decided that Wikipedia usage should be discouraged. However, I would argue that this is short-sighted as it could be used to develop media literacy skills and encourage students to read about history, math, the arts, and sciences.

Case studies

Based on the case studies, many of which had little content and were infrequently updated, I would caution that a wiki may not be the best collaborative tool for a library because to be successful a wiki needs a large number of users. While a library may have tens of thousands of regular users, only a fraction of them would likely join the wiki. A single library with one of the micro-wikis that I mentioned might terminate the project when they find they spend an inordinate amount of time recovering from vandalism on a project with little content.

For a public library to be successful in creating a wiki, the wiki requires thousands of articles and a strong user base. A wiki may not be a great tool for a library, but it could be a great tool for a collection of libraries. If the Southern Ontario Library Service (SOLS) created a wiki, it would likely become successful as there are millions of patrons and thousands of potential wiki users. With the integration of a reciprocal lending policy, users could find and request hard-to-find materials. 

A wiki can be used as an inexpensive enterprise content management (ECM) system as explained in The Common Craft Show. A wiki, like an ECM, has version control allowing users to examine and protect documents, as well as a history page for each document providing the ability for everyone to track changes to documents. While this sounds good in theory, it could run into problems unless the project had strong leadership that reminded users to put O (objective) before E (Ego), without exception.