Reading the Library Stuff blog I stumbled across this post. It links to a post by Mark Chillingworth on the Information World Review blog entitled “Information industry must join the Wikipedia community“. In the post Mark writes:
Wikipedia is a community, not just of those that put time and effort into editing it, but also the users. Therefore the best place to meet your perspective users, introduce them to your content and advise them on better information gathering practices is at Wikipedia. Information professionals and information providers should be playing a considerable part in improving the content on Wikipedia; you can cite their own content and generate leads and users from there.
The idea, as I see it, is for Libraries to take the discussions we’re having about information literacy and access to our collections to the users of Wikipedia. This includes the discussion that we should be having about not citing the Wikipedia, and gaining access to the world of knowledge we have access to via our subscriptions. It is in direct competition to the existing thinking I posted about the other day where access to Wikipedia is blocked.
Users will always find a way of getting around a block. Whether it be by accessing it from home or somewhere else off campus, or more technology advanced ways like using a proxy server or cache. Users are still going to be accessing the Wikipedia, so why not communicate with them about the other resources they have available to them where they are? It is a very interesting idea.
On a lark I did a search and found the page for the University of Adelaide on Wikipedia. No mention of the libraries though, perhaps it is something I should be adding to my ever growing to-do list.
Taking the discussion to the users of Wikipedia is an interesting idea and I wonder if it will flourish. As always I’m excited to be thinking about the times we’re currently working and living in, and look forward to seeing this type of technology exploration evolve.
