Thing 18

Wikipedia's like Google, in that it's the dirty secret of all librarians. Like everyone else it's the first place we look, when we think no-one's looking. Hopefully we use it as a starting point, and check our references. My favourite story is that of the hapless Daily Mirror football reporter who came unstuck when he looked up AC Omonia. Nature found that Wikipedia and Britannica were of similar value in terms of the accuracy of science articles, which caused an almighty row.

What do I think? Well it's a reasonable place to find out the first thing about something you know nothing about, and fine for things that don't really matter; minor mysteries that were discussed in the tea room, for example. Having found peer reviewed journal articles and published textbooks with inaccurate citations, I would always check the original source before I cited it myself, and I'd never cite Wikipedia, people would laugh at me. Interesting that, isn't it? They wouldn't laugh if I cited Britannica.

Thing 17

I've been looking at wikis this week, wondering whether we can use Weblearn to store, comment on and edit documents for our web team. As part of thing 17 I clicked on the socialouls link and typed in my usual username and password on the offchance that I already had an account. Turns out I do. Turns out the web team already has a wiki there too. Might have to give that a closer look!

In order to prove I'd edited something, I searched for errors at socialouls. I guess everyone else got there first... I formatted some text that was in the wrong font on the blogs page and tried to separate two links that were joined by underlining. I failed in the latter, several times, for which the history gives me several lines of credit! Removing the link and putting it back in again would probably fix it, but it seemed unnecessary and tiresome.