Wiki @ Work!

It's 9th week and time to look at some wikis. I explored the OULS Web 2.0 wiki and looked for refs to OULS that might need changing to 'Bodleian' - now some of them seemed obvious, but what about those posts which refer to a time-sensitive issue which is now no longer relevant - should we update the post to reflect the current terminology even though at the time of writing the reference was to OULS? Could there not also be an issue with documentation of changes? This idea of time-sensitivity and the immediacy of posting on a blog or wiki is of course complicated by the 'edit' function - you can change your content to remove evidence of the former entry (or at least with our blogs the post that appears is the most recent edit).

I looked at Wikipedia and a specific entry on the poet of my D.Phil. thesis (a chap about whom I hope I know rather a lot after 3 yrs!). I was about to edit the page as I strongly disagreed with the use of certain broad categorisations, but then, when I clicked on the discussion tab, someone else had already had this little scrap with the author and the author of the article had decided to slightly modify his post, and yet still keep some of the contentious terms. It is excellent that this discussion panel is visible though as it shows that the original article is not to be taken at face value!!