#16 Wiki Me This

The wiki idea and its web sites are awesome and great. It is like a democracy on collecting knowledge, creating and editing web pages on information of the universe. This collaboration of millions of people from all walks of life in the cause of generating information and entertainment on the Internet tools is called folksonomies, the best example of folksonomies is wikipedia. The truthfulness of the huge amount of information and knowledge posted on the wiki websites is under the sharp scrutiny of millions of authors, knowledge-holders, and critical eyes and minds. The readers/users are ready to edit your postings or simply delete them. The number of entries I used on the mother wiki site wikipedia are all very accurate and concise, rich in contents. I like it and use it. Sometimes I worry about improper editing or vandalism on excellent articles, but like democracy, the majority and the best always survive and prevail.

The wiki idea (infrastructure) can be applied to improve our customer services in two ways, one is internally for staff, the other is externally for the customers. For the library staff one, it can be a site like http://www.qlwiki.org/ that contains subject matters like collection development, cateloging, cyber center, customer services, training and staff development, YA, J-matters, shipping, black experiences, romances, science fiction, hotpicks, etc., or any topics the management would like collecting wisdom and ideas for the staff for. For the external wiki it will not be as easy as the internal one because it is hard to find common subjects/topics that are interesting and attractive enough to get our customers' attention so that they are willing to devote their time to contribute on them. The Book Lovers Wiki is for the Princeton area summer reading clubs and individuals. We had a summer reading website from the New York State for both 2006 and 2007, our customers could contribute book reviews, but it was not wiki, that is, others cannot comment or revise. What kind of wiki ideas can work with our customers and they can benefit from this new service? Let's brainstorm it together. Right now what I can think of is to wiki best seller authors, fiction and nonfiction, by writing reviews for other customers to read and edit.

Some people ask what are the differences between wiki and chat or newsgroup discussions. The wiki articles are more formal, they can be edited to become more satisfactory by other users. There will be a thing valuable as a final result produced by collective and collaborative work and wisdom. While chat and newsgroups do not automatically have that kind of results.

Let's Wiki; we work on it and we benefit from it.