Thursday, May 8, 2008

Thing 16 Wiki and Me

I've spent a considerable amount ot time exploring wikis because of my concern for who authored them. What do I know about this individuals and how do I find out about them is the basic problem I have with wikis. Most of my career was spent with peer reviewed journals and published books where the author's identity was known and a very important part of the reference work that I did.

I was able to find out when the info about Sparks was changedfrom the history
tab:
Pink as of Aug 29, 2007
Magenta as of Sept 10, 2007
Sourced Sept 11, 2007 by Garnetpoint (however I don't know who Garnetpoint is)

This exercise furthered my explorations of wikis and I have now learned a little more about how they are authored and some of the controls on them. Looking at the history made me look to see what was behind the other tabs.

I did take a quick look at the "Library Success Wiki" and it had more useful information than I expected to find. On the "recent Change Page" I found information about libraries using IM for reference work. This seems like a useful thing for libraries to do but i"m not really sure this is web 2.0--sounds more like web 1.0 to me.

2 comments:

sewinglady said...

I agree about the authorship of wikepdia. The exploration of the tabs was a good exercise. I am now more comfortable with the basic information and still feel this is a good place maybe to start looking for information.

IloveWikipedia said...

I agree about being a little cautios about Wiki's and Wikipedia in general. However, I have found Wikipedia to be very accurate when on information I know alot about. I believe there was actually a study done a couple of years ago that stated Wikipedia was just as accurate, if not more so, than Encyclopedia Britannica.