Wiki-Wiki What?

Besides being the latest online rage, a "wiki" is a web page or a collection of web pages designed to allow anyone who accesses it to contribute or edit content. In some cases, it's like a blog that several people post on; in other circumstances, it is used to create collaborative Web sites for businesses or organizations. The best part about wikis is that their use is expanding. Tomorrow's wiki will be unlike yesterday's. One of the most common wikis is one I'm sure many of you have heard of: Wikipedia.

If there is a special club for "only-the-best-librarians," I'm sure I will never be asked to join after this post.

I, a librarian, am in full support of Wikipedia.

There, I've said it, and it's out there and I can't take it back. In actuality, I'm in support of all the Wikimedia projects as I firmly believe they can add to any research project. You may not have known how many there are as they seem to add a new one every few months! So here's a rundown:

Wikipedia
Commonly known as "the free encyclopedia", Wikipedia is a project to build free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Virtually anyone with Internet access is free to contribute, by contributing neutral, cited information.

Wiktionary
Wiktionary is a project to create a multilingual free content dictionary in every language. It actually aims to be much more extensive than a typical dictionary, including thesauri, rhymes, translations, audio pronunciations, etymologies, and quotations. The project started in December 2002, and as of January 2008 is available in over 100 languages with over 3,000,000 entries in all.

Wikiquote
Wikiquote is a repository of quotations taken from famous people, books, speeches, films or any intellectually interesting materials. Proverbs, mnemonics or slogans are also included in Wikiquote. The project started in July 2003; as of January 2008, it includes over 75,903 pages in almost 50 languages

Wikibooks
Wikibooks aims to build a collection of free e-book resources, including textbooks, language courses, manuals, and annotated public domain books. It aims to help both (self-)instruction of students, and teachers in high-schools and universities. The project started in July 2003 and now has over 84,000 modules from over 5,000 developing books, across over 50 languages.

Wikisource
Wikisource is a multilingual project, started in November 2003, to archive a collection of texts that could be distributed as free and open content. It is not only a useful format for storing classics, laws, and other free works as hypertext, but it also serves as base for translating these texts. At the beginning, source texts in all languages (except Hebrew) were all on one wiki. However, Wikisource now has several editions in many individual languages.

Wikispecies
Wikispecies is an open, wiki-based project to provide a central, more extensive species database for taxonomy. Launched 14 September 2004, Wikispecies is aimed specifically at the needs of scientific users, and as of January 2008, has over 125,000 entries.

Wikinews
The Wikinews project was launched in December 2004 with the mission to report the news on a wide variety of subjects. As of January 2008, 23 language versions of Wikinews have been launched, producing more than 48,000 news articles in total. Contributors from around the world write news articles collaboratively. Reports range from original reporting and interviews to summaries of news from external sources. All of them are required to be written from a neutral point of view.

Wikiversity
Wikiversity is a project dedicated to learning materials and learning communities, as well as research. It was set up as a Wikimedia project, on 15th August, 2006, with the English and German Wikiversities, as well as the multilingual co-ordination hub. Since then, these have been joined by the French, Greek, Italian and Spanish Wikiversities. Despite what its name may suggest, Wikiversity is not limited to university (or tertiary) level materials, but is open to materials and communities of all learner levels.

So, how can I, as a librarian, support the use of Wikis in research? Simple. Read the references in the Wiki articles. Not every article has been written by Joe Schmo who made up a bunch of stuff. Some really useful information can be found at any of the above links; and a lot of it has been written by credible sources. Any Wikimedia Web site is very searchable and easy to use. You don't even need a librarian to show you how.