There’s plenty of content that has yet to be wiki-fied that could do with a new home, even my Library Songs page as I am quite tardy with adding new suggestions – http://www.blisspix.net/library/songs.html and I’m sure there are many other lists and collections that could benefit from being added to a wiki too.

As to the discussion about why someone would start a new wiki instead of adding the content to LISwiki or to the Library Success wiki (both of which I have used and in the case of the latter, contributed to), there’s a couple of reasons, and I think these would hold true for a few subject-specialised wikis:

1. I wanted to gain experience with wiki set up and administration. I knew how to use and edit them from Library Success and Wikipedia, but admin is another issue.

2. I took a look at other wikis, websites and blogs and thought that if I added the LISauthor content to those other resources, it had the potential to be hard to find within the established directory structures.

3. Some of the things I am talking about, like repositories, there are multiple hosts and versions of (eg – many people add their work to either DLIST, ELIS or both, or their own institutional repository). I think this is a good thing: one goes down, there’s another available.

Although I have started a new wiki for this topic, there is no reason it cannot be duplicated elsewhere, LOCKSS right? All the material is CC licensed so there’s nothing to stop someone that thinks that content fits their wiki to duplicate it themselves. And that’s the same for most wikis.

I plan to continue to contribute to other wikis (including Library Success and Wikipedia) but running a wiki of my own gives me motivation to contribute more regularly to these types of resources.

And, Blake, I’d already created Library Success in late June and was adding content to it when John contacted me about his wiki. I had spoken with quite a few people at ALA Annual about creating a wiki to collect best practices and started publicizing it a few days after John publicized his. I wouldn’t exactly call that me reinventing the wheel.

The reason I did not merge Library Success with LISWiki early on in the development of both wikis is that I wasn’t a fan of his original model. His wiki didn’t have a particular mission statement or purpose that would compell people to contribute. The Library Success Wiki did. And that was something many people have mentioned as being problematic in making a wiki successful — you need a clear purpose. And I think John found that to be the case as well since for a long time, he was the only one adding content to the wiki.

I think they are both excellent resources, but serve different needs. I don’t see anything wrong with specialized wikis. I just know from experience that creating and maintaining a wiki can sometimes be a real pain, and that if people want to avoid that and create something within Library Success, they are more than welcome to and I will do anything I can to help. It may be the case that many people have wanted to create wikis on a certain subject, but didn’t know how and this would give them the opportunity to have a space.

Specialized wikis build a sense of community. There are librarians who would never contribute to the wikipedia who would add to a collection of resources for librarians. Whether that is right or wrong, it is the reality.

I have offered to collaborate with other library wikis created after LISWiki was launched, and have also tried to reach out to the editors of several “one man directories” out there, but without the best results. Usually, as with the author of the blog directory mentioned here, I just get ignored. And in at least one case so far, the person chose to literally take it with her rather than include it in LISWiki.

I guess it’s just a question of what level of granularity people are comfortable with. There’s a thousand strong links at LISWiki’s blogs directory, however, so I’m not sure why there’s a need for another version, wikified or not. Because everyone can edit them, a big plus of wikis is to avoid such duplicative efforts.

Those concerns aside, I have to applaud the act of sharing information, since it still feels like the “lurker” mentality is a larger threat to spreading information, and not having it “die trapped inside of us.”