Word of the day

Today's word is knol, and thanks to the indefatigable Peter Suber for that. Knol is Google's answer to the Wikipedia, and Peter quotes a Google blog posting which describes knol, launched on 13 December, and standing for " a unit of knowledge." "Our goal" the blog goes on, " is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only." Wikipedia, to which knol is a rival, has an entry on knol, as one would expect. The BBC has an interesting item on the knol, too, ending with a quote from Nicholas Carr, who suggests that the knol project is a head-on competitor with Wikipedia. "He said it was an attempt by Google to knock ad-free Wikipedia entries on similar subjects down the rankings."

This blog is a friend of Wikipedia, as previous postings have indicated. but as a librarian, the more information the better. Surely?

Word of the day

Today's word is wiklipedia - you can find all about it at the Wiklipedia website. Look closely. I found it through a typing error, as most people will. It promotes various causes - eBay for those people wanting to buy an encyclopedia, au.shopping.com (another cute domain name variation) and, basically, advertising. It doesn't actually incorporate an encyclopedia of any kind. Never mind - you can use the Wikipedia, which works fine. Registering misspellings is prohibited under Australian rules, so this is an international domain.

Wikipedia - the seminar

The Jimmy Wales Wikipedia seminar started off with a prediction by Jimmy that the cost of textbooks and learning materials will drop to zero within a decade or so, and the cost of computers to $100. We all cheered that one, if a little sceptically.

Thank you for contributing ideas to this blog. I guess that the key point made by Jimmy Wales was that the Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It is better than any other encyclopedia (he implied), but that doesn't make it a textbook, or a scholarly resource, or anything else but an encyclopedia.

The Wikipedia also comes with an ideological framework. Wales is part of the free culture movement, and in fact is a member of the board of Creative Commons. He speaks of creating a base layer of raw cultural materials built on Wikipedia, Flickr and many other sources. Wales is opposed to censorship, and there is no legitimate Wikipedia in, say, China.

Wikipedia is also planning to move into some other services - open serving (free hosting for people making content and software freely available), a Wikia search engine (modestly described as "Google's worst nightmare), multi-language versions (there is a goal of an encyclopedia for all language groups with more than a million speakers - pity about the Welsh), and more. When we were chatting, I suggested a dictionary built on contributed examples of usage (just like the OED). Wikipedia is the 10th most popular Internet site (according to Alexa).

An interesting day, and the panel was interesting too - some old friends, like Daniel Ingvarson, Randall Straw (head of Multimedia Victoria), Rodney Sparks of E-Works, as well as James Farmer (The Age's Online Community Editor), Dr Martin Wild and Sarah Phillips (a Deakin student), all coordinated by Mark Pesce. My role on the panel was to represent libraries, which I did by pointing out their equivocal responses to the Wikipedia, but their essential and intrinsic sympathy for its open access to knowledge goals. Watch for the podcast version!

Wikipedia again

I mention this topic again because I am part of a panel at one of the Jimmy Wales seminars - Challenging How Knowledge is Created - that education.au is organising. You can find out all about them here. Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.

I also mention the topic because I have to start thinking about it, the Melbourne seminar being on 27 April (there are also seminars in Perth, Adelaide and Sydney).

Naturally, I would appreciate your ideas. I offered to represent ALIA on a panel, and got the gig due to the absence of competition, as is so often the case. It is a busy week for me, mostly in Canberra - a meeting of the board of the Australian Digital Alliance, an AICTEC (IT in education) interoperability jamboree on Tuesday, the National Library's very popular Innovative Ideas thing on Thursday, and a meeting of Picture Australia contributors on Friday.

What to say? What to avoid saying? Let me know. I will be representing libraries, and I am currently operating on the principle that the Wikipedia is the best thing since the invention of the library two millennia or so ago.

Wikipedia - friend or foe?

One of the themes I set out in my 100-word election blurb was the need to build bridges with other information players, based on our values. I am involved with a few such players - the Internet Society of Australia, for example, and Electronic Frontiers Australia. The two organisations have a close coincidence of values and policies with ALIA.

For example, the ISOC-AU email list has recently been discussing the Wikipedia. The debate has been very similar to a debate which might occur amongst library people – they are our friends, and this is shared territory. It has been interesting.

My own take is that we are all increasingly just using the Google search engine – i.e. the whole wide world wide web - as a kind of de facto encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a part of the Web that is a bit more quality-controlled than just googling the entire Web. It is a subset (a large one), and more authoritative than the Web as a whole. The point is that you have to make your own judgements. The Wikipedia has clear advantages – it is very comprehensive, it is free, it has a degree of quality control, and it is often quite astonishingly current, especially compared with a conventional encyclopedia.

Before the Wikipedia and the Web came along, people most often asked their friends or their mum (mostly not a librarian) if they had a question. Benchmark Wikipedia against them, I say (sorry, Mum).

The broader point is that this is not just our library territory - authoritative reference sources - but shared territory, and we need to link up with other people who care about it.