I have a confession to make. When a library customer asks me about something that I have no idea about, I often check Wikipedia first, just to get an idea of what he or she is talking about. Based on what I find out there, I then go to other sources to actually get answers for the customer; and sometimes the information gathered at Wikipedia perfectly satisfies the customer.
Yesterday, I was listening to an essay on NPR, about online resources and their reliability, and the author stated that Wikipedia has turned out to have amazing accuracy and reliability. Occasionally there will be mis-information, but fairly quickly, the mis-information gets edited out and replaced with accurate facts.
Wikipedia is the wiki that most everybody has heard of, but there are wikis for just about any topic one can think of. I once contributed a booklist to a wiki of booklists; I can't remember where I found it, and forgot to bookmark it, so now can't find it anymore. There are craft wikis, fan wikis, club wikis and ... you name it.
I love the idea of everybody being able to edit and contribute, although I think to be truly reliable, you have to have some official entity in charge and keeping things organized and up to date. I would love to have a Storytime and Programming wiki for the library, where ideas could be exchanged and kept up to date.
A long time ago, I developed a website called My Storytime, which was very popular, with complete plans for preschool storytime, including flannelboard patterns, book suggestions, fingerplays and more. I stopped maintaining it about five years ago, and have often thought that it should be re-imagined as a wiki. It became too much work to keep up by myself, but would be fun if lots of people could easily contribute.
This entry is part of my Learning 2.0 project at Spokane County Library District.
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