war of words in wiki world

i read an article in the age newspaper today which talked about the two camps which have emerged in the1000 strong wikipedia administrator field, namely the 'deletionists' and the 'inclusionists'. having recently watched the lord of the rings and also being in the middle of a david gemmell saga the thought of two waring factions in the quest for 'truth' caught my attention. so I decided to investigate.

according to the article and various web sources, the rise of the deletionists - who assert that wikipedia in not a dumping ground for facts, that standards of notability have to be upheld - is threatening the 'wa' of an otherwise democratic and peaceful world ofwikipedia. inclusionists say that all information should be included even if it is of interest to just a few.

i did a quick seach on the meta-wiki, the site which discusses how to manage wikipedia, and discovered there is this whole seething underbelly of debate and discontent going on. so if you think that you are 'wasting time' by getting addicted to online cartoon avatar lookalikes of yourself (my favourite is the southpark one, btw) then go and check this out and feel a bit better about yourself. ie "Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgements About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are In Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They are Deletionist".

= Wikipedia adminstrators who don't seem to understand the concept of brevity in writing for the web. nice, also, wtf?!

for me anyway, this adds a new dimension to wikis. for the purpose of comic relief I am posting the entire set of 'wikipedian philosophies' below. enjoy. but in all seriousness, it highlights one of the biggest problems in managing a wiki. that is, if everyone has a different philosophical approach to information management, then who is right?! and how do we deal with deletionists and inclusionists with fundamentally opposing views?

Darwikinism
Deletionism
Delusionism
Essentialism
Eventualism
Exclusionism
Exopedianism
Immediatism
Inclusionism
Incrementalism
Mergism
Metapedianism
Separatism
Wikidemocratism
Wikithoritarianism

hawaii 2.0

hawaii has been responsible for many wonderful things in the world, such as pizza toppings and tv police dramas. the latest of these good things is the wiki. wiki means fast in hawaiian. and to keep true to that spirit I am going to type this posting really fast.

i think that wikis are great online collaboration tools. as shown from the examples they have myriad uses in libraries like documenting library procedures, or for book recommendations. wikis take the concept of online interaction a step further than blogs as participants have the opportunity to not only comment on existing content but create new content for themselves. they accord an increased level of trust (ie not to spoil or stuff up the content or deliberately misinform...speaking of which I remember that there was some nice work in this field for our PM recently) in the user.

the ways wikis work are user friendly, so errors are easily fixed, as i discovered when i added my blog to the plmc learning wiki. I also a new 'favourite web tools' link on the sidebar. i think that once you understand the general concept of adding links and images then its pretty easy to transpose this knowledge to many online social collaborative spaces.

i also couldn't help by add my favourite sports star to the sports pages, who also happens to be hawaiian...

ALOHA

to the or not to the - that is the question

my rss feed reader delivered my some news this week that i wish to share to anyone who cares about catalogue records and indexing, especially margaret who may be reading it because i am sure that she would understand, being the dedicated and thorough cataloguer that she is.

The annual Ig Nobel Prizes are meant to honor scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think,” according to the founders at science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

What grabbed my attention this year was this year’s Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize, which was awarded to a Japanese (who else) scientist for developing a method for extracting vanillin from cow dung. Previous society-changing award-winning achievements from Japan include the invention of karaoke, which received the Peace Prize, and the Tamagotchi, which received the Economics Prize. Imagine a life in Japan with NO KARAOKE.

But onto the library related information which is the point of this post, the ig noble award for literature this year went to Glenda Browne of NSW Australia for her study of the word “the” and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.

I think we have all encountered this problem when trying to find DVDs for patrons...

To be more informed, read the article, which examines rules and practice relating to the filing of ‘The’ at the beginning of index entries. It recommends that the definite article should be accorded ‘more respect’.

I used Technorati to find 59 posts on the ig noble awards, which are all very deserving.

thing 13 is delicious

i use delicious for when I come across an internet article that I want to read, but don't have time at that moment. delicious allows me to tag the site with the click of a button and come back later. and when I come back to review my collection of tagged sites i have the chance to either keep them it if they are worthwhile, or delete if not. i use it as a reading list, rather than a 'favourites' list. but i think that's ok as there is no particular way to use delicious.

im a bit embarrased to share my list though, cause there's a wide range of sites that probably won't appeal to any particular person unless you are me. for example, in my current delicious set I have train timetables for central japan, handbag enthusiast blog sites, stuff about creating southpark avatars, alia links, and various social technologies articles.

so unless you are a handbag collecting southpark loving podcast learning wiki adding japanophile, then you may not appreciate to the fullest extent my set of tagged sites.

in summary, delicious is one of the few 2.0 tools that I do actively use.

it's all 2 much

last week i got all confused when I had two copies of a melways street directory to consult. what if i chose the 'wrong' copy and took the wrong directions to my destination? my life would have been so much simpler if there was just one copy on the shelf.*

same applies to a lot of this 2.0 stuff. for example, on facebook there are about 10 book sharing/recommending [what librarians call reader development] applications. using them all is not practical. so which do i use? which do i recommend to patrons/friends?

i once recommended Shelfari to a patron who wanted to keep track of what she had read. i probably should also have told her about librarything. personally, i would be spewing if i had signed up to librarything then found out that all my friends were using shelfari. dammned if i am going to recatalogue all my books.

i guess what i am trying to say is that we should take some time when choosing what 2.0 tools libraries use and recommend to patrons. research. know your demographic and what they are using. have a plan. give informed options.

onto the actual question required from this post: library 2.0 is a nice term for the libraray profession to adopt and everything, but from an end user(our patron)point of view, what we [can] do in library 2.0 land is really no different from shopping on retail sites such as ebay or amazon.com. in my opinion it's web 2.0 hijacked and pimped up by us librarians. but having said that, it's semantics, and all good in the final outcome of what we are doing by using this stuff.

*in the end I chose the most thumbed through melways copy, thinking that if more people had read it it was probably more accurate than the other one.

ryo

checked out rollyo. rolled my own. did some sample searches. got frustrated with the results in the pre rolled examples but was happier when i customised my own. nice to know about and to have if you don't have acess to the really powerful tools like factiva or lexis nexis. not essential.

have added search bar to blog of various newspapers that I consult when really important issues in my life arise, such as chris mainwaring's tragic drug overdose, what the chaser have done to get arrested this time, the internet crackdown in burma, or who got voted out of australian idol

Stephen Abram, leading international librarian and ‘lighthouse thinker’

The TS posse had a mini field trip to check out what Steve Abram 'international librarian and lighthouse thinker, had to say to us. Amongst the many things that he said (I think I missed some though, because he spoke really fast and my brain wasn't able to process everything), I found this diagram very interesting. click on the image for a version that you can actually read

Basically, from a Forrester survey of US internet users it shows what each age group is doing online. have a look for yourself and see if you are up with your US counterparts.

another interesting point he raised was about our library management systems and ipacs. we librarians think they are the best thing, like, ever invented. but does the end user necessarily agree? i doubt it. mr average library user doesnt care what an ipac is, nor how it works. for all intensive purposes, it's the interface which allows him to find a book.

embedding a library ipac in social software that people actually DO care about and use, such as myspace or facebook, is something that has been done by some libraries in other countries. it is something tht we should also consider.