For Thing #16, we’re supposed to learn about wikis and explore some.

My 13-year-old son, a few years ago, was the one who introduced me to wikipedia.  He loves to have his browser access a random article and read it.  He’ll look at wikipedia to research something specific, and then get snagged into reading about something else.  Since that was a reason people would give for having an encyclopedia set in the home, it seems like a good thing!

Although I do remind him to take Wikipedia information with a grain of salt, I’ve been reminded that the venerable Oxford English Dictionary started life as a wiki.  But compiling the little slips of paper that people used to present definitions of words was a much more tedious process than today’s internet!

We used PBwiki in my Resources for Youth class in order to create a group website.  It was much simpler than what the other groups were using.

Wikis are perfect when you want to have lots of people contributing to a website, and a wonderful way to do a group project.

Our 13th of 23 Things for my library’s “Learning 2.0” program is to explore http://del.icio.us and tagging.

However, they didn’t want us to install del.icio.us buttons on our work computers, so it seemed to me that kind of defeated the purpose.  The idea is to tag your bookmarks–the more easily to find them later.  I’ll have to try it on my computer at home.  I do like the idea.

I was interested in the articles I read about tagging.  Especially so because next week, I’m starting a graduate class called “Content Representation.”  It’s about indexing.  I’ve already started doing a little bit of the reading.  It seems to me that tagging on websites is like a grand indexing project done by laypeople.  You won’t have standard terms used, but the sheer power of hundreds of thousands of people doing it will create some useful links.

It’s going to be interesting to see if my Content Representation class talks about how wildly popular tagging has become.

One of the articles–I can’t seem to find it now–said that the strength of Google’s gmail is that they allow you to tag e-mails rather than assign them to only one folder.

When an item can only be in one folder, that’s hierarchal organization.  But with tags, you don’t have to stick to a hierarchy.  You can assign multiple tags to each file.

I’m loving this aspect of tags with my book reviews.  I still have my main site, www.sonderbooks.com, organized in a hierarchy.  I have reviews divided into groups:  Nonfiction, Fiction, Teen Fiction, Children’s Fiction, Children’s Nonfiction, and Picture Books.  Within those categories, I have the books divided by genre.  But I can only put each book into one genre.  What do I do with the Thursday Next books, which are part Science Fiction, part Fantasy, part Humor, part Mystery, and part Literary Farce?  I think I chose Science Fiction, but it was a tough choice.

Enter tags.  Now I have a blog alongside my site, at www.sonderbooks.com/blog/.  In the blog, I post the reviews as well–but now I can tag them according to multiple characteristics.  Lovely!