and when she was bad she was WIKI!

I have long been a fan of Wikipedia and despite constantly having to remind myself that everything on it must be taken with a pinch of salt I have for many a year been known to lose myself in Wikipedia “sessions” for an hour or two. As such, I have a bit of Wiki experience under my belt (Wikiperience?). The first thing I learned with this task is that Wiki is the Hawaiian word for “fast.” Always good to know these nuggets of information! The second thing I learned was that there are other great and comprehensive wikis besides Wikipedia out there - I’m not sure I’ve ever even dared venture outside the Wikipedia behemoth.

I found Wetpaint to be a very pleasant site and I had no trouble getting use to it and exploring its pages and features. The Oxford web 2.0 wiki was particularly comprehensive and I was most impressed with it (if not a little embarrassed to have never heard of it before!). There was way too much information to absorb in one sitting, so I concentrated on a few select topics and was most pleased to discover such a thing as a SOLO search widget that can be embedded into your facebook page – what a great idea! I was particularly impressed with the “Easy Edit” tool, literally transforming the entire page into one interactive, editable page with easy-to-insert features, layout tools etc. Admittedly, this tool does not seem to work on Internet Explorer (as warned), which is not so much of a problem as there are a lot of Firefox converts these days, but still. All in all, this is the nicest and best editing tool of this nature I have come across. My contribution was limited to adding a link to the Sainsbury Library facebook page and doing a bit of the suggested “OULS spotting” (soon to be a national hobby, surely?), of which I managed to find one example. The biggest OULS “spot” of all, though, must be the web address http://socialouls.wetpaint.com, though I guess there’s not a great deal we can do about that.

I like Wikipedia. I like Wikipedia a lot. It’s one of the first places I go to after I’ve finished reading a book or watching a film and I want to find out more. I think I’ve even done a little bit of contributing in the past, although I can’t remember what for. I’ve never really noticed, or at least paid attention to, the 'history' and 'discussion' tabs at the top of the page and I was most intrigued to explore them having been promised that they can make for very interesting reading, especially concerning controversial articles or subjects. I decided to read up on, “The Master and Margarita,” figuring that it has potential for controversy, and was most pleased to find a lengthy difference of opinion concerning the new English translation, which still does not seem to have been resolved or incorporated into the main article. For me, this really highlighted the need for the thorough verification of the facts and information included here and the importance of adhering to a journalistic style that is neither so void of opinion as to be uninteresting nor so overtly critical as to be biased – a tough line to straddle. This is both the strength of a user base as large as that of Wikipedia and its weakness. It’s a truly great site for browsing, but you couldn’t site it in an essay.