#18 Zoho

This is a test post from Zoho Writer to see if it works. If it does, I will be very impressed.
It didn't. It refused to recognise my username and password, even when I opened up another tab and logged into my journal using the selfsame rejected username and password.

Oh well.

Even more impressive is the fact that I have found Web 2.0 technology that seems incredibly useful! Mind you, I actually found out about Zoho and some of the other gadgets last year or the year before as a way around the perennial complaint from our users that they can't word-process because we don't have Word installed on our computers. I think I found Zoho because I felt sorry for one of them. I have found that I don't really broadcast its existence to all and sundry, however, for fear that our already chronic problem with people spending far too long glued to the computer screen would become even worse.

Anyway, this is a Web 2.0 application that seems really useful. It offers the online collaboration that I thought was nifty with a Wiki, while also offering much simpler and more intuitive formatting, etc. Document sharing would be really easy, and if you don't want to share, it's just a good way of keeping stuff you need to use all the time in a place that you can access from anywhere with an internet connection. Kind of like a remote backup server for your essential documents. Not sure you'd want to put up something terribly private or personal.

I will probably use it a bit more (now that I've got round to signing up) for creating documents that I can port between my desk and the reference desks. I've already used it to compose an email that I'll be sending out later - its interface is a lot nicer than that of the web-based Lotus, which is way clunky.

And just because I could, I also created my own wiki. I have no plans to really develop it, but I wanted to play around with it and see how easy it was. I reckon it's way easier than the software the PBMLCLCBCL (or whatever the acronym is) used. Though I suppose I already know enough html to be able to put in links, if I didn't it might be more of a challenge.

About my only gripe (come on, you know I had to have one) is that occasionally the cursor seems to do odd things. But it's a very minor gripe. I'm very impressed, and that's hard to do!

Still impressed, but couldn't get that whole blog feature to work. Honestly though, I can't see that it will matter much as if I want to keep posting to a blog, I'm perfectly happy to log into the blog and compose it on that software.

Wikis and accuracy

Just thought this was rather timely news in Wiki Week of Learning 2.0 and thus would share.

Virgil Griffith, an almost-grad student at CalTech, has developed a tool that tracks down the IP addresses of people who edit Wikipedia entries. Apparently the tool has already shown up some unsurprising biases, such as Wal-Mart editing entries on Wal-Mart, someone from Diebold (manufacturer of allegedly faulty voting machines in the US) editing the entry about their allegedly faulty machines, the CIA edited entries about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. PCWorld has a reasonably comprehensive report here. And according to the prestigious blog The Huffington Post, Fox News have been doing the same thing.

This doesn't really change my overall opinion of Wikipedia as an information source: it can be a useful place to start getting an overview of things, but you can't necessarily trust it, particularly on political issues or anything controversial, because you don't know who's edited what or what their biases are.

The thing is, this isn't that much different from traditional forms of publishing. Publishers of newspapers, books, encyclopedias and journals may all have their biases, from an organisational level down to particular columnists or contributors. Part of becoming a good researcher is learning how to evaluate the accuracy and bias of information, how to read between the lines and detect an agenda or predisposition, to evaluate based on whether authors attempt to present both sides of an argument or admit conflicts of interest. In some ways, Wikipedia may actually be an improvement because at least tools like Griffith's offer a modicum of transparency, for those who care to pursue it.

And that has always been the case—that misinformation propagates because people don't consider the source, they don't consider issues of bias or accuracy, they don't always question what they read or are told. From Shakespeare's slandering of Richard III to the Tonypandy Riot of 1910 to one of my personal favourites, the urban legend about people swallowing eight spiders in their sleep every year (there's a great story about the origin of that particular myth), the spread of false information shows that a convincing untruth, especially if it captures the imagination, will survive longer than the truth.

Question everything. Assume nothing. Use Wikipedia for what it's worth. But boycott Fox News.

#17 wiki encore

Have dutifully added my humble blog to the list of favourites.

Poked around a little bit more. I can see a lot of ways that having a wiki could be really useful—group assignments or tasks, for example, particularly if you set up the structure so that different people have the main responsibility for fleshing out the content for particular areas.

I think I remember my brother sending me a link to a wiki that was a reference tool for a fictional world, with entries on geography and history and politics and everything, all according to the interest of those who got involved. Although very geeky (my brother is a geek) it's also kind of neat.

It could work for book reviews (as one of the sites linked to in the other post showed; I actually liked that one). It could work as a way of managing user-generated input, although I'm not clear as to whether the software or functionality could be embedded as a component of a larger site. It does have a lot of possibilities, and if it's an add-on instead of the main focus of something you do, then it's not so important if nobody contributes, or does so erratically.

Basically, a wiki seems like a good collaborative tool—whether it's a collaboration of equals (roughly) or whether it's a secondary contribution.

I do find it mildly discouraging to have to learn an entirely new way of adding content (despite PBWiki's claim that it's as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich and requires little training and coding, it seems more complicated to me). It's a useful reminder that those without a basic grasp of html (mine is pretty basic, but fortunately I do have one) must find blogging and wikis and lots of other things more intimidating, which no doubt contributes to the WYSIWYG-induced popularity of, say, blogger vs other journalling software like livejournal, which does require more in the way of html if you want formatting.

The other thing that occurs to me (rather belatedly, and it's a bit of a chestnut) is that all these collaborative social networking technology tools are all very well and good if you have a computer and reliable internet access, but if you don't, you're pretty much stuck up the proverbial without the proverbial. I know that historically, new technological developments (oooh, paper! oooh, movable type!) have always created an initial division between those who had them and those who didn't before becoming more widespread. But I do think we need to maintain our awareness that not everyone wants to use these technological tools and not everyone who wants to use them has the ability to. I have already written longer than I meant to, so will not go into this more at the moment, but the library's role as intermediary and obligation to be all things to all people is certainly worth pondering.

Maybe in my free time.

#16 Mending my wiki ways

A person’s view of human nature, and specifically the nature of the users of a wiki, directly affects whether that person sees the wiki as being bound for anarchy, utopia, or fated to oscillate somewhere in between.

—Blake, Peter. Using a wiki for information services: principles and practicalities.

I'm an oscillator. I think wikis are a great idea in some circumstances, particularly for information sharing internally. I was thinking that translating our procedures manual to a wiki would be a great idea, and started reading Peter's article accordingly. Partway through and it's all sounding like various debates I've been hearing about what to do with the intranet, how to control access and keep it up-to-date and that sort of thing. Maybe there would be turf wars about who was allowed to update the procedures, arguments over so-and-so getting the procedure wrong, entries deleted altogether in a fit of pique, new slanderous ones being put up in retaliation...it could all become quite soap-operatic!

The cynical part of me thinks that if we started up a wiki procedure manual, it would soon devolve into the kind of infrequently-updated and even more infrequently-used mess that our current PDFed version on the intranet already is, and nothing much would happen at all—good or bad.

On the other hand, the e-help pages we run are pretty frequently used. So maybe the larger question is: is it worth translating something that already works reasonably well in its existing form into a new form that might be more work to update and possibly get corrupted by inaccurate information? Especially when we've already got an entire slv21 project devoted to finding new solutions for these and other organisational issues?

Hmmm. The pondering continues.

As far as the library wikis I looked at goes, they mostly seem to suffer from the issue of people being insufficiently interested in some areas and incredibly interested in others. Also, a wiki that consists of a lot of links has little to distinguish it from a delicious account, and I have to wonder why one would bother setting up a wiki if one wasn't going to actually provide, you know, content. Crazy, I know.

In other news, I have come to the realisation that starting up this blog has given me an entirely new online identity: a ranter. I am far more optimistic in real life, but there is something about the medium of the blog that just inspires my inner rantiness.