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Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Poe Article: The Hive

Just recently at work I joined one of our many strategic planning committees. The committee that I joined is responsible for re-evaluating our current competency charts for various positions held in the library (para-professionals, clerks, librarians) and clarify any ambiguity that may exists. We decided to post the current competency charts into a wiki. Everyone who is a part of this committee joined the wiki and at our leisure we are able to enter the wiki, review changes made by others, and we can also make our own editorial changes. In the article, Poe mentions "a loose community of users". I feel that my colleagues and I have created a loose community of users in efforts to get a variety of opinions on how to make our competency charts more practical. The wiki tool that we've chosen to use as served us well. Now instead of having long drawn out meetings about the changes we're suggesting we are simply able to make changes at our convenience.
I can't say that I agree with Poe's suggestion that Wikipedia permits organization and improvement and the Internet does not. I am interested in knowing how he defines "organization" and "improvement". I have a very general knowledge of how Wikipedia works but I would imagine that with it's users ability to edit at their own free will, organization and improvement could be a challenge at times. How is the credibility of each Wikipedia contribution evaluated? Is it always objective? Is it always true?
I believe the Internet and Wikipedia share the same vulnerability in the areas or organization and improvement because each tool is an open source to everyone.

1 comment:

Chris said...

The one advantage that a wiki has over a routine web page is the ability in a wiki to backtrack to a previous version of a page.


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