Wiki, a change of tune... or an old tune resurfaced?

As I rail on open source information and the influx of useless or cumbersome tools that try to organize the junkyard of words and images available to us all... The i get the wiki exercise for my LIS 506 class, and while there are still major cons with the wiki situation, it is a tool that I actively use for information retrieval.

First, let me address the major pitfalls of wikis... they are too open! Like specialized encyclopedias 9which are closed to specific authors) there is no real editorial policy and contributors can submit some really awful stuff. As Stephen cobert has mentioned, anyone can create their own wikiality - their own reality by posting it on a wiki (wikipedia was his target).

That said, there is a real upside to wikis that i haven't seen in many other 2.0 sharing tools. That is organization and cataloging. This helps information on wiki be policed better, even though their remains no editorial policy.

What do I mean?

So I am interested in elephants. putting a google search for elephants, wikipedia will be among the first hits that come up. It is easy to find my subject (and it is easy for experts to find my subject as well) The community of experts in any field, or subject have a vested interest in having their subject reflected accurately in the most of popular forums and given the easy access they have to finding and correcting information on this platform they can police their subject.

The format, and organization of wikis are the aspect of control that is lacking in tag generators and blog searches. Is it perfect? no, but it better organized and serves a specific online community of users. It is a good example of a public domain digital library.

OK, the philosphizing is over. Why do i have such a glowing review of wikis when all my other posts on web access are awful? One site IMSLP. The International Music Score Library Project. It is a wiki devoted to capturing, storing, cataloging, and retrieving digital images of public domain scores. It is linked with Sibley Music library (which had a $200,000 grant to digitize its scores) so the Sibley collection can be uploaded to IMSLP and accessed by scholars world-wide. Furthermore, the same scholars that use this as a resource post their scholarship in other sections of IMSLP. You can see research and get bibliographic links to your favorite composers or historical aspects of music. Again, because of the organization of the wiki (subjects easily accessible) and the community of users (music scholars) the users police themselves.

This wiki is probably among my top 5 resources for music research and shows how effective an open source, open use digital library can be when it is organized correctly.