The Library Geek

This week, our LIBR 246 class is working on wikis. Two of the week’s actvities are editing the LIBR 246 class wiki and editing a public wiki. Aside from occasionally consulting Wikipedia as a source of preliminary information for a research paper, or to read up summaries of TV series or book series I am interested in, or to get information on a subject I am curious about, I have not created or edited a wiki page before. So to prepare for these activities and get acquainted on what wikis are all about, I read the Farkas chapter; listened and/or viewed Prof. Faires’ introduction, the Common Craft video, Chad Boeninger’s presentation on wikis in libraries; the screen cast by Jon Udell on the history of the Wikipedia article, Heavy metal umlaut; and read the Andy Carver blog post on MediaWiki. What I got from all of these resources is that wikis are more than web pages “on steroids;” that what makes them preferable to static web pages, or even blogs, is what makes them a Web 2.0 technology, that is, wikis are all about collaborative creation and maintenance of content.  The social networking element of wikis makes it a useful tool as a resource guide for like-minded enthusiasts, educators, and information professionals; a repository for policies and procedures for organizations; and an information and communication component for project management.

The first activity is to edit the LIBR 246 class wiki to add a library-related wiki. The instructions of Prof. Faires were pretty straightforward and I added two library-related wiki pages. The first link is for the NMTC Library wiki that I sourced from the Library Success wiki. I choose the NMTC Library wiki as it is a good example of one of the many uses of a wiki. It is a wiki used as a tool to organize and make efficient access by staff to current information on the library’s policies and procedures. It gathers the day-to-day, as well as, seldom-used but important policies and procedures, like their disaster response plan, under a single page with a table of contents whose entries are active linked. It also has a search box and the overall look and feel to it is simple and easy to use, but does the job of getting the information to a staff at a click of a link.  I also found another library-related wiki at the PACL site. The wiki is called PACLBooks and I added it because it is a good example of another use for a wiki, which is, a tool for information professionals to provide readers’ advisory to their customers as well as encourage community collaboration by soliciting book recommendations from them.

The second activity is to edit a public wiki. I choose the Wikipedia article on the California Academy of Science as I noticed that it did not have any information on visiting hours and membership details. Editing was again straightforward, even with how the article is formatted since you can easily compare the code used to follow the style of the page. For example adding two = sign on either side of a phrase creates a divider to distinguish that you are starting another section of the article, or putting the * symbol creates a bullet point at the beginning of the sentence you are typing.

Here are screen capture of the wiki page before and after the edit.

I also added a citation of the source of the information I added to the article.

I typed the following code:

<ref> California Academy of Sciences. (2008). Membership Materials [brochure]. author. </ref>

Wherein the code  <ref> “your reference citation goes here“</ref> adds a citation number and a reference endnotes on the bottom. Here’s how it looks like on the page. It is endnotes number 19.

I also decided to add an image and align it to right with captions. I googled “embedding an image on a Wikipedia article” and it provided me with the information that I have to first upload the image to Wikimedia Commons. To upload an image to Wikimedia Commons you have to create an account or use your existing Wikipedia account. I went to the site and also read on their policy on copyrights before I upload the image. Since the image is a photo I took, I designated the copyright license as public domain.

I also read the instructions on not only embedding the image but also aligning it to the right with captions. The following code accomplishes it

[[File: Ray_fish_at_the_Academy.jpg|right|thumb|maximum width in 320×maximum height in 215 px|Ray fish at the Academy]]

Here’s a step-by-step instruction on how to do it:

1.       You type the code in the area in your article you want the image to appear

2.       Type between two open and close brackets, File: name of theimage.extension – this part of the code embeds the image on the article. In the article I edited I typed Ray_fish_at_the_Academy.jpg because that is the name of the file I uploaded. You do this after you have uploaded your image to Wikimedia Commons.

3.       Type next the following |right|thumb|maximum width in XXX×maximum height in XXX px|caption. This part of the code aligns the image to the right, specifies the size of the image and captions it. In the article I edited I replaced the XXX with 320 and 215 because that is the size of the image as recorded by Wikimedia. I replaced the word caption with “Ray fish at the Academy” since that is what I want the caption to say.

4.       Then save and you are done.

Here’s a screen capture of the article after I embedded the picture.

Best practices advice: Before saving your edits, I find it very useful to click on the button “show preview” so I can see how the page will look like even before I save.

Here’s a capture of the history page of the article.

Here’s a link to the wiki’s history page. It shows my edits, to add visitng and membership information and to embed the picture done at 20:40 and 21:09 on February 6, 2009. These timestamps reflect the default server time or about 8 hours advance from my time zone.  Also my preference page indicates that my user ID is the 8,999,390^th on Wikipedia. Cool!

So there you have it. Please feel free to ask questions or comment on this post.