Wikis: What We Don’t Know We Know, Ya Know?

Everybody knows something.

One of the beautiful (and frustrating) things about interacting with other people is that we all have different life experiences. The television I grew up on is different than my sister. The food my classmate considers “traditional” will vary from mine. The best book I read in high school might be unknown to someone from another country.

To my mind the best thing about the internet is that it is a place to pool our collective knowledge. Everybody knows something, and those things are different. The internet is a place where we can share and compile that knowledge. It gives everybody the chance to get to know what they don’t know, ya know?

This is where wikis comes in. Sure, we could all just spew knowledge into our own blogs or social media spheres, but that keeps us separate, individual. To get the most out of our collective whole we could try to work together and organize it all.

A wiki is a platform for organizing and editing information that is open to everyone. Basically, someone writes something, be it a thought, bit of knowledge, an opinion, and anyone who accesses that wiki can edit, add or react as easily as editing any text document. Now that we are well into the era of the wiki that might seem trivial, but it is a radical concept, the height of web 2.0 . Whereas with blogs everyone can separately write whatever they want, wikis allow everyone to contribute to a greater whole.

Honestly, I’m not sure how useful wikis are to libraries. Internally they may be very useful, providing a simple way for information to be shared and worked on between colleagues. However, for communication with patrons the benefits of a wiki over a blog or standard website aren’t necessary.

But it is sad to see that wikis seem to be waning in popularity, because it brings people closer to being little librarians themselves. Wikis make simple one of the core tenants of libraries; provide access points to information. The difference is that this information is culled from everyone, not just people who have published content. It’s a democratic understanding of language, limited only by an economic position that allows the internet and the desire to add to the knowledge. This is exciting, because while everyone knows something, no one knows everything.