Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki

From Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki

Click here


"Update! Because of vandalism problems, e-mail confirmation is now required. Please enter your e-mail address when you create an account and you will be sent a link to confirm your address (after which you will be able to edit the wiki). For those who already have an account, click on user preferences (while logged in) and under "e-mail" click on the Confirm your e-mail address link. Sorry for the inconvenience."

This sums up all my misgivings about wikis. Another site says, “Anyone can add or edit pages in a wiki – it is completely egalitarian.” This statement was all I needed to damn them forever in my world.

When I want information I want to know without any shadow of a doubt that what I am getting is from a reliable source, from someone who has the qualifications to post the information and that the information posted has been checked and double checked by other qualified professionals to ensure that it is correct. I do not want information posted by an amateur or by someone with an axe to grind posting malicious misinformation. Imagine how governments can manipulate the minds of the ignorant with propaganda on these so-called open sites!

It reminds me of a conversation I had with an architect who said he wouldn’t step into a high-rise building built after 1980 because architectural and engineering students could no longer do calculations without technology; that they often made typing errors that gave incorrect calculations which they accepted as correct because they had no prior idea about what the correct calculation should have been. Every calculation had to be checked and double checked by the lecturers and, one hopes, by the senior staff in any architectural and engineering firm since 1980! Were the specs for leaky buildings posted on a wiki?????

Serious sites, such as the one quoted above, will have to establish controls to control the information added or edited, otherwise someone will have to constantly check the site to make sure that no malefactor has interfered with it. What else will librarians have to do when there are no more books?

No wonder educators won’t allow students to use Wikipedia for their studies. What professional would?

Having said that, I checked out some of the library wiki sites and found them to be most interesting and informative - an excellent way to make one's Brand known to the rest of the library world, presumably with input from interested parties who would be monitored in some way?