Ah, the wiki. This is something I know a bit about, as I have a lot of experience with wikis. Here at work, I created the WPL Reference Wiki. There’s a story behind that. Once upon a time, we were getting a bunch of kids asking questions about good autobiographies to read for a school assignment. I’m still not 100% sure that biographies would have been OK, but they all said autobiographies. Anyway, we had a series of emails going back & forth between individual Reference staff and the branches with new titles added every round – just like the example in the Common Craft video. This seemed like a perfect problem for a wiki, so I created one. It’s also a good place to list titles for our ‘staff picks’ displays. I wish more staff would use it (hint, hint), but it has proven useful. It got a real workout last year after OLA – I created an OLA page and everyone was asked to summarise the sessions attended for all to read. The page for OLA 2010 is up & ready to go.
Otherwise, I also figured out that wikis could be useful for my fire truck hobby. Some fellow enthusiasts and I all collect information on what trucks are used by what fire departments, so I created a wiki at Jimbo Wales’ Wikia site. Wales is one of the creators of Wikipedia and Wikia is a for-profit wiki site. It’s free for me to set up the wiki, but there are ads. Nothing too bad at this point. I’ve had some outside contributions, both from people I know and people I don’t. In both cases, I was able to improve the information I keep by collaborating with others. This is a pretty specific field in a small hobby, so I don’t expect a lot, but it’s still sorta neat. Adding info to the wiki is relaxing and brainless work too.
Finally, Wikipedia. I set up an account and contributed to Wikipedia for about a year in 2007 and 2008. In some ways, it was kind of fun and rewarding, but in others extremely frustrating. I got in a few minor skirmishes with people who were determined to edit pages to reflect their own personal biases. I have my biases just like anyone, but I really tried to be as objective as I could. These people didn’t even pretend to be objective. I didn’t enjoy that. Also, when I created an article about the library, a 14-year old from Puerto Rico (politely and nicely) accused me of conflict of interest. That was dealt with fairly amicably, but it was still annoying. The most bizarre encounter was with some anonymous weirdo. S/he kept editing the article on Trenton, Ontario to include some PhD student in the list of notable citizens from there. I and some other editors kept deleting the name and told the person to knock it off. The weirdo was obsessively persistent and eventually started stalking me and my edits on other articles, claiming that I was running more than one account (‘sockpuppeting’) and posing as the other editors that assisted me. They eventually found the whole thing with the WPL article and tried to dredge that up again. None of this stuck and I received lots of helpful support from other legit editors, but I had enough. It just seemed that there were too many editors with mental health issues out there. Something fun was turning into a big headache and my wife couldn’t understand why I was getting all worked up over a voluntary effort that was supposed to be enjoyable. So, after seeing Andrew Keen at OLA, I decided to give it up in February 2008. Not 100%, but 99% anyway. I still maintain the library page and I’ve made a few random edits to other pages, but that’s it. And I don’t regret it at all. Now I see that Wikipedia is losing editors – they still have a lot, but I can see why. It takes a lot of time to deal with the trolls and such, and most people (I think) eventually tire of it. I did a little poking around and see that some of the editors that I used to see all of the time (including the Puerto Rican kid) have cut back on their edits or stopped altogether. Others are still going strong.
