Survived the wiki exercises. I can see that there is a great deal of useful application for wikis, particularly in the library and information world. I like the idea of people sharing information, in fact it is one of the things that I still find astounding about the internet generally and this new capacity to communicate globally. People who would never have been aware of the existence of others who shared a passion for a particular topic can now talk accross the globe. Of course, this is probably a little scary in a way.... Anyway, wikipedia is certainly an amazing tool, as long as the validity of the content is not taken as "fact' without further investigation. So here is my point of complaint. I think the younger generations, who grow up with this technology WILL take anything on the web as gospel and there will be so much misinformation out there. But maybe this is where society is headed and 'close enough is good enough' will be the new accuracy. As a librarian, I am afraid I still feel that there does need to be some sort of control of information from respected and responsible sources, such as libraries. It is great to have the public adding favourite books, or commenting on pictures etc, but it needs to be made very clear that it is the public and that the library catalogue and information remain as an authoratative source.
Having had a play in the sandbox, it is obvious how easy it is to change information, pretty much word processing on steroids. The technology behind it however, allowing us to do this is extaordinary.
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