Thing 10: Wikis

Wikis, I have heard the word before but I really didn't know what it meant until thing 10. Of course I have used Wikipedia extensively and sometime more extensively then my profs probably liked and as Librarian Associate I do use it to answer a patron more basic questions. I looked at a few of the Wikis that were listed and fore the Library Wiki sites I found it very interesting as most allowed patrons to add information like reviews about different books but there was also a link to the catalog record so that a person could see right away if the book was in or not. What I especially liked about the Book Lovers Wiki which is from the Princeton Public Library is that you could not only write a review and it was linked to their catalog but that there were links to outside websites. So, I found out that library Wikis can be really helpful and cool. Yes, I said cool and I really think that our library would benefit form having our own Wiki.

I added a new page to the 23 Things on a Stick Wiki. My page asks the question: What are GREAT about 23 things? And if you want the answer you need to find my page which I have a link to it on the home page. Creating a new page was easy figuring out how to link my new page onto the home page was harder and trying to format that link was the hardest think about thing 10. What I learned from adding to the 23 Wiki is that formatting a Wiki page is important. I feel that one person or a group needs to be in charge on how a page is formatted because the 23 Things Wiki is very confusing to look at there is a lot of different information on the web page and some of it is related and some of it is not. There are links to other pages but they are not all in one spot. So, a Wiki can be a great thing with people adding their own input however there need to be a clear concision on how information is grouped and the page formatted.