Every time I use Wikipedia I discover a new widget or facet to it that I really enjoy. I enjoy it because these facets make my user experience better.
In juxtaposition to this I have been talking to publishers about the changing shape of the market and how they do feel threatened by Wikipedia. To combat this, publishers are, rightly, publishing promotional material to educate students and users to skip the fast food Wiki diet and tuck into some healthy peer-reviewed material from the library.
All well and good, but as our attendance to recent conferences regarding greener business practices demonstrated, telling people to turn the telly off standby just doesn't work. Instead we have to develop integrated processes that subtly change their behaviour by meeting them where they want and making their existing behaviour greener.
I can't help feeling that our own community needs to do something similar. IWR doesn't want to rubbish the teaching of good information literacy, but we can't help feeling that this education and an improvement in the information should take place within Wikipedia.
Now, before you all shoot me down, let me explain. 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.
Wikipedia is in many ways a platform, it has a host of information within it, and it seamlessly leads users to other sources within and beyond Wikipedia, so therefore the information industry should accept and embrace Wikipedia. After all it would be a waste of time telling anyone not to use Google as the web search engine of choice today, Google is a platform and it has become a part of our landscape. Wikipedia has the same potential, IWR knows publishing houses in the business area that are updating entries for areas they are specialists in and have gained around 200 extra visitors a month from Wikipedia alone and the subsequent revenue.
Well, yeah. When people ask Wikipedia what we think of this we say "damn right you shouldn't be using it in papers!" But what it is ideal material for is how to use not-100%-reliable but good sources in a practical manner - Wikipedia, Citizendium, blogs, newspapers, Britannica ...
ReplyDeleteI agree. The key point is to add the skills and experience of information professionals, and the resources at their command (catalogues and open content) to the places where users are. Jon Udell's librarylookup was an early example of this.
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