Thing #16 Wikis

Wikipedia is one of the ways my husband entertains himself when he's too tired to do anything else. We also look at it as a first stop when we have a burning question on some trivial matter. Yes, we know it's not always authoritative...I have read some entries and said to myself, "is that really true?" and unless you really get worked up about the matter and investigate you may not know. But it has something no other reference source has...it's fun. You can look into where the info came from, you can see the edits, you can see what's under construction. The homepage always has something different you didn't know about.

What applications within libraries might work well with a wiki? My first thought was any kind of policy a committee is working on. An idea can be floated and edited and revised and worked on in an open environment until it has a concensus.

I enjoyed the BookLovers Wiki from Princeton Public Library and would love to see HCL do something similar. There are a few of our regulars I'd love to see do a "booklist" kind of wiki because they are always reading something interesting or they use our Interlibrary Services to great advantage to bring materials in that we don't have (at the present). To have their knowlege and input available for everyone to see and comment on would be tremendous. We have a very educated population (literally we have rocket scientists using our libraries!!) and bringing them into our web world can only enrich us all.