I was surprised to see how many things "Wiki" does! Cataloging everything, including animal species!
Wikisource -- I'm interested in wikisource because it deals with texts. Since text recognition is the next big step after Gutenberg's mass producing text in the concrete world, it stands to reason that we need texts and textbooks, including esoteric or difficult to acquire texts available online as well. So much is NOT online, but we can be deceived into thinking everything we need IS. There is a book about this, about why Google does not "contain" or send us to all the world's information. It is not all online, and Google doesn't always know what's best or what's best for US. But perhaps it's just a matter of time before all extant physical texts will be scanned. Like the need for living, breathing, synthesizing teachers, we will always need living, breathing scholars, researchers and librarians, even if their job is to direct us to the right place, the right resource online.
I love how Wikisource even chronicled its own negative "reception" by those fearing falsification and questionable scholarship, but it went on to name other entities who quote it and reference it.
Wikiquote -- I chose Wikiquote because I'm always interested in good quotes on subjects and also who/where quotes I hear or use all the time come from. I actually have physical books in my library of "famous quotes" and "famous phrase origins." No longer needed, since it seems that anything that popular IS already online. I was surprised that there WAS such a thing as Wikiquotes, however, because when I Google quotes, I never seem to get Wikiquote as a source/resource. More often than not, it's www.GoodReads.com which can be an amazing way to skim through the best parts of a book or an author or speaker to get a snapshot of their thoughts.
I too did not know about Wikiquotes or quite frankly some of the other projects. There was a great NPR story a few weeks ago, It was talking about how medical school are training their doctors differently. Instead of asking them to memorize all this information, they are teaching them the skills of looking it up, where to search and so forth. As teachers and as just people we need to teach others and ourselves how to sift through all of this stuff (online and not) to ind the information we need. There is so much out there. I know this is a tangent but your comment "Like the need for living, breathing, synthesizing teachers, we will always need living, breathing scholars, researchers and librarians, even if their job is to direct us to the right place, the right resource online" reminded me of this news story. 3/3 Kendra
ReplyDeleteHi Helena,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading about Wikisource as well as some of the textual information that it offered. 3/3.
Whitney