Wikiwiki

Incidentally, the tidbit about "wikiwiki" being Hawaiian or Hawaiian slang for "quick" is something that I've heard at least three times before, promptly forgot each time, and then remembered I already knew once I heard it again. My brain is odd.

Anyway, I'm a big fan of wikis, but I'm not necessarily a fan of calling them out as something "separate" from other content. Wikis seem to represent the purest form of user-generated content, and I've watched them grow from a standalone product (which is used pretty effectively for things like subject guides and hierarchical lists, the latter of which I referenced more than once during my trip through my MLIS program) into the basis for entire library websites.

Indeed, browsing the USC Aiken Gregg Graniteville Library website made me think of our own spiffy new site; the end-goal for our own site is for it to be a sort of controlled wiki, with multiple people updating content on the fly and thus keeping it more current and more diverse. With that in mind, I went in to our SPL 2.0 wiki to add my blog and a message from the most huggable Great Old One ever, and discovered that it uses nearly the exact same content management system as the backend of our website. Go figure!

With wikis come the ever-present debate of bibliographic control and information authenticity, which is what makes Wikipedia such a hot-button issue. However, within a library institution that has define style and content standards, I think a lot of those problems can be avoided while reaping the benefits of multi-user content. Ultimately, it boils down to personal responsibility for content, and as always, an ability to be discerning when researching information; after all, I find Wikipedia to be an enormously helpful tool, warts and all.