I guess like a lot of people I had only heard of Wikipedia. I didn't know that wiki's were used in other ways. Some of the examples given on the learning 2.0 site were very interesting. I had previously thought that Wikipedia would be very unreliable and subject to "Vandalism". I remember seeing an entry in it for the Sydney suburb of Naremburn which had obviously been tampered with by high school aged boys. But having experimented with changing the library wiki myself (a couple of spelling mistakes and an added entry for my libraries local history page) I could see that there are some safeguards against such things. They were 'signing in' which seemed to stop totally anonymous entries and providing a "History" of changes so that mischievous entries could be changed.
I can see how organizing events with a group of people involved could work with a wiki, but I hope that it doesn't mean the end of the meeting. What if we spent our working day looking at a computer screen instead of looking at the faces of our colleagues. I know It's not always possible to have face to face meetings I admit. I guess people have been saying things like this since computers were invented.
The Wookiepedia was very interesting, I didn't know there was so much detail of information about a few silly Star Wars movies(I'm joking I loved them). With the New Zealand police wiki I couldn't see where one would edit it. Interestingly I saw mentioned a problem that they had with people who were changing 'New Zealand' to 'Aotearoa'. It shows that editing can be political and not just high school pranks. The Princeton book review wiki was a bit different in that you add reviews to it instead of editing the information that someone else has written. Editing other people's opinions would defeat the purpose of a book review I would have though. Would it have been better if it was a blog rather than a Wiki?
My exciting find of the week was the Aqua Browser on the Queens (NY) library website. It looks extremely primitive as it is, but I found it fascinating. I could imagine a more sophisticated version with subject headings which would make searching much easier. If you are reading this and you haven't seen an AquaBrowser go to this website and check it out: http://aqua.queenslibrary.org/
Bye.
2 comments:
Wow - what an full week! You have covered lots and lots of territory in your discoveries. Great stuff.
Ellen
I thought Wookipedia was fabulous - and I totally adore the name. It is comforting to find that there are Star Wars fans more fanatical than me.
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