Wikis (#16)

I love, love, love the idea of wikis. I'm completely sure I am not the first person to notice this, but the ultimate wiki is the real life hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. From anywhere, you can use your handheld device to look something (anything) up. That's so cool! As a librarian, I can't think of anything cooler. The reality is though, that people have to actually work on the wikis constantly, because if they aren't up to date, they're nothing, right? The library wikis we were asked to look at were a mixed bag. The best one was the Princeton Public Library's Book Lovers Wiki. I wished I lived in Princeton so I could participate. I'm a sucker for anything that contains reviews. I found a link from the Library Success wiki to a search engine for librarian written book reviews. Genius! Except when I tried to use it I couldn't get any relevant results. Too bad. I thought the SJCPL Subject Guide was merely so so, because the specific subject guides weren't really all that informative and many of them hadn't been updated in quite some time. At least they didn't seem to be wrong or offensive. For about three weeks last year, the Wikipedia entry on Uzbekistan contained someone's idea of a joke and I kept meaning to find the time to change it, but didn't. That to me sums up the problems inherent in wikis. But, it's always great to find information on the most obscure of topics which is what a wiki guarantees. There will be a person out there who is an expert on the strangest thing you can think of!