It’s A Wiki World

Yesterday, in our reference department meeting, we took some time to acquaint ourselves with some of our new database acquisitions. One of the things we have added to the list is Wikipedia. There has been some general discussion in the LIS Blogsphere about the virtues and failings of this resource. Nothing is infallible. We did some test searches comparing Wikipedia to one of the better known online encyclopedias and the things we paid for failed miserably and the free information ruled the day. I am glad MPOW has included it on its resources because there are some true gems among its pages. The bossman pointed us to this page on Wikipedia today. This serves to illustrate why having an ““encyclopedia”” that does not go through the usual publishing cycles can be timely and informative in all the ways in which normal media can not.

–Jane, there is a Wikipedia article for everything