(week 3) wiki-tastic, dude

Genealogical Records for Non-English Speaking Countries

A work in progress, as with everything else in my "to do" list! UPDATE: I've linked to this on the SLV Desk Wiki.

I find Zoho fairly clunky to use. It seems to have terrible trouble applying the font sizes I select - I can rarely get my changes to "stick". And I don't like that, when you "create a subpage", you're not given a chance to choose where the page will fit into the wiki's structure - it's just automatically shoved in wherever you are in the structure, and you have to go back to the site map to move it to where you want (which isn't made clear in any of their help pages).

Also, in the last round of Learning 2.0 experimentation, Zoe invited me to contribute to the desk wiki and we discovered that even though she'd given me "full" editing rights, as the creator of the wiki she had more rights than me (e.g. she could reorganise the structure of the wiki, but the drag and drop reorganisation feature on the site map was disabled at my end).

I'll catch up with RSSing when I get back from my hols...

EDIT: Didn't get a chance to finish this post due to the inevitable pre-holiday rush. What I've been wanting to do add is some comments about the usefulness of wikis in the library sphere. Of course they have obvious drawbacks - their inherent changeability leads to questions around the authority and reliability of their content, and as Gumleaf notes, they are heavily reliant on having a large and/or active community involved for them to remain accurate and up-to-date - but overall I'd much rather have them than not!

Like Oscar, the number of times I use Wikipedia to get me started on AskNow (to find useful links or to get a quick refresher on an obscure topic) more than justifies its usefulness.

I also quite like the idea of YourArchives, The National Archives' (UK) wiki "where people can share their knowledge of archival sources held by The National Archives and by other archives throughout the UK". The combined advice of those experienced with using these complex collections will be incredibly valuable. I also suspect that the level of technical and historical knowledge required to contribute discourages frivolous entries, cutting down the number of errors included. Once again, if I was researching Oscar Wilde and was unable to find anything in the TNA's excellent online research guides about him, I would much rather have a wiki entry (with potentially some errors in it) than nothing at all to start with...

flotsam & jetsom

Yes, after sitting unused in the tide of effluvium that is the Internet for 2 weeks now, my blog finally makes its (not so) long awaited debut. At the very least I hope that it "makes sport for my neighbours"...

I have to admit that I've secretly been looking forward to Learning 2.0. I say secretly as round SLV I'm expected to be a bit of a boffin with new technologies - but there are actually quite a few Things on our list that I only know about in a theoretical sense, and have never got around to experimenting with (hello RSS).

That said, I can't claim total ignorance of Things 2.0, especially as this is the third blog that I've created with Blogger. It's interesting to come to back to the interface after my last forays - especially to see how how difficult it now is to locate the privacy settings, and how I can no longer quickly opt out of having my blog available to search engines, as was the case before Blogger was bought out by Google!