I’m pretty sure I come off as a permanent early adopter, the first to use anything new and shiny. But that’s only true to a point. Blogs? Instant understanding and adoration. (Online, Roll-Playing, MMOR) Games? Didn’t touch one till I was in my 20s and my roomate played them constantly. Wikis. I’ve always understood the usefullness of wikis but they don’t really appeal to me. Mostly it’s that I have trouble with letting go of my words so others can change them but I also have a paranioia about the quality. I firmly believe spammers are demons in hell forcing their pain on the rest of us. And they just can not leave a good thing alone. So a good wiki takes a lot of supervision. The users of Wikipedia do this themselves. But you can’t just assume you’ll have an interested and paricipative audience. And yet, it does fulfill a purpose of collaborative knowledge sharing in real-time without the delay and confusion of comments.

With the advent of two library-focused wikis (LISWiki, Library Success), I took the plunge and did a little contributing and editing. And it was very easy. The wiki structure doesn’t make much sense to me but I think that’s the default interface design of MediaWiki which both wikis use. However, I’m struck by how easy it would be for my colleagues to use. I’m thinking that once we get the intranet set up that I’ll install a wiki instead of a blog for keeping track of internal information. Currently, there’s a paper notebook at the reference desk and a wiki could be an electronic notebook to take its place. While blogs are item-oriennted, the wiki would have a page on each topic that would always have the latest information.

No, I’m not planning on rolling one out for public reference, yet. We have a lot of catching up to do technologically. Plus, I’m not sure the community is ready for one. There’s a lot of work to do first, and part of that is a survey to find out what the patrons want. I love new technology but it’s useless if people won’t use it.