Wikis

I use Wikipedia on a near daily basis for a variety of reasons, but it actually took me a while to realize that Wikipedia was just one example of a wiki, and what exactly they could be used for. I also have had experience with pop-culture based wikis, for instance, there’s one for the Harry Potter universe, with entries about every character, actor, book, event, object, etc that its users can think of.

While I like the idea of a wiki a lot, I do realize (especially if I was a librarian instructing students) how dangerous it is to believe everything you read on Wikipedia and similar wikis, because it is edited by people who don’t always list their sources, and anyone can change it at a moment’s notice.

After learning more about wikis, I see the variety of functions and uses, which are all pretty great.

One of the example son the 23 things website I liked was the Princeton Public Library’s Book Lovers wiki. I LOVE the idea of a wiki based around people reviewing books. It’s kind of a shame that the site as is now seems pretty limited, and I wonder what a site like this could become if it was on a larger scale, with less moderation of who could post. Websites like Amazon and Goodreads are great places to read book reviews already, so I wonder exactly how popular/useful a wiki of people posting book reviews would be. It would have to be set up differently, so that for each book multiple people could upload their own reviews, but to then have people be able to search by review, as this site does with looking for only 5 star book reviews, which I found to be a great feature, would be great. To have people tag the books themselves as well, with both rating, what they think an appropriate age group would be, etc would be great. I also think it would be interesting if in a wiki you could see a book’s page and reviews, and be able to then have links from it to similar authors/books/plot genre, etc. While all of these features are available in a multitude of websites, I’d be really intrigued if all of these could be combined into one website.