The closing keynote of the JISC Conference is being given by Angela Beesley who is a co-founder of ‘Wikia’ – the commercial arm of Wikimedia, and is currently chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board.
Angela is outlining what Wikimedia and Wikipedia is – I don’t think I need to repeat this here. Now she is talking about ‘Wikiversity’ – which is a place students can go to explore their learning goals, having collections of pages dedicated to learning, and teachers can create and share lesson plans, and it also links to another project Wikibooks. As with Wikipedia, these wikis are openly editable.
Angela says that you can’t always trust all the information on wikipedia – but you can trust the process, which leads to corrections, and tends towards accurate information. She’s just shown a slide where the Wikipedia entry on JISC is flagged as ‘written like an advertisement’. This seems fine to me, but I was interested to read an article in the Guardian last week about the process of editing – what is clear is that it is very difficult to keep up with all the changes that are happening (need to put in link here).
Angela just comparing the size of Wikipedia to Libraries – 1.7 billion words in Wikipedia, whereas the contents of Libraries worldwide estimated in the trillions.
Angela says that if Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia, Wikia is the rest of the library.
Wikia allows more depth in specific areas – e.g. the WoW Wiki has 55,000 articles about World of Warcraft.
Wikia brings in more collaborative tools, as well as providing Integration with 3rd party applications and information.
Wikia Search – new this year, which is an attempt to apply a wiki model to search. This was launched earlier this year with some fanfare, but not exactly critical acclaim. Angela acknowledges if you use it at the moment, you won’t get very good results.
Angela covering how to go about setting up a wiki:
Socialtext, Confluence, Google Wiki, Wikia, PBwiki etc.
We’ve got a Confluence installation at Imperial College, and the Library has been using it for a number of things, including documentation, collaborative working and document sharing, and we are currently considering using it to start creating a specification for a ‘next generation’ search product for our library collections. One of the issues with the Confluence wiki is that you have to have an Imperial login to use it, so it is not easy to collaborate with users from outside the institution. What we haven’t got is a ‘community’ aspect to it – the wikis are inward facing for the library, and access is limited to library staff, or even specific staff within the library. In some areas this is because the information could be confidential, but we should give some thought as to how we might exploit it more in a community type way.
Overall, the talk was basically an introduction to wikis – OK, but not that inspiring. A question that came up at the end was about what should lecturers say to their students about using Wikipedia – and Angela was clear that we should ensure that students understood the nature of Wikipedia, and the information on there, and to use it appropriately (i.e. don’t trust it without verifying the information) – this is interesting as it is very much the ‘Information Literacy’ approach to information (not just Wikipedia).
Angela blogs at wikiangela.com/blog