Wikis - Week 5

Wow! I came to Week 5 ready to be unimpressed with wikis - I was under the influence of Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur that has a lot to say about Wikipedia and how Larry Sanger, who ran Wikipedia's day to day operations and was responsible for policing the lunatic fringe amateurs who posted and reposted thousands of entries a day came to realise that ..."the democratization of information can quickly degenerate into an intellectually corrosive radical egalitarianism. That the knowledge of the expert does triumph over the collective 'wisdom' of amateurs....and that fully democratic open source networks inevitably get corrupted by loonies" p.186

But after having a look at BookLovers Wiki Montana History Wiki and SJCPL Subject Guides Wiki I am prepared to give them another go.

I can see us using a Book Lovers wiki on our emerging Readers Advisory page at Mosman and a Subject Guides wiki would work very well in bringing the Libraries collections to people at home. The Montana History wiki was of interest to me as I have a friend who is the Special Collections Librarian at Montana State University and a board member of the Montana Historical Society. This kind of wiki would be a fantastic local studies resource that would be of interest to local historical societies and that would allow their collective knowledge of all things local and historial to be accessed by others interested in local history.