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.

Thing 15 Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 Unanswered questions

Web 2.0 has certainly arrived and many people are using it. I'm not sure that I want to spend large chunks of my time using it. I would prefer seeing and talking to those I know than strangers who may not even be those they say they are. I can see some value in some of the blogs, especially when I know who created them. One thing I learned of value about Web 1.0 is that I want to know who created the information and when did they last update it. In many of the articles in wikipedia I have no idea who created them and therefore am hesitant to rely on the information they present.

Input from customers has value but if we reach the point that we are concerned by the customer's input we diminish our own standing. This buy into the argument that everything is available on the Internet for free. As librarians we know this is false. As long as there are commercial enterprises and copyright Web 2.0 will never provide everything for free.