Quickly on wikis

This is one of the #23things which links today's internet with its historical origins. It is based on:

"collaborative websites which can be directly edited merely by using a web browser…by anyone with access to it". 

That quote comes from Wiktionary, "the free online dictionary", whose entries are built, and later built upon, by its users. It's related to the famous Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia.

Attitudes to Wikimedia projects have tended to be derisive and elitist, exactly because it's common people contributing their knowledge freely, bit by bit, in their own language, relying on other volunteers to check its authenticity. Anecdotal evidence supports this; we all must have heard a story of someone logging into Wikipedia to change an article, just to win an argument at the time.

That argument broke down for me after realising two things:

1. Wikimedia material is updated faster than professional academia, and
2. The information in it is surprisingly detailed, and surprisingly high quality, since it's not aimed at any particular audience.

At this point, I remember a time in primary school where we had to look up the meanings behind days of the week and months of the year. I had the Oxford dictionary, which was different to everyone else's, and told me this much:

" The day of the week after Tuesday and before Thursday".

By contrast, Wiktionary tells us this much:

" The fourth day of the week in many religious traditions, and the third day of the week in systems using the ISO 8601 norm; it follows Tuesday and precedes Thursday".

Its page goes on to discuss the etymology (word origin), audio clips for pronunciation, as well as writing guide in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The online entry also lists informal and derived terminology, translations, and how its use and spelling has changed over time [in English]. As said on the homepage:

" Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics and extensive appendices. We aim to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it".

Just like Wikipedia, the homepage for Wiktionary has an introduction, and some content to help people begin: a featured word of the day in English, and the "foreign word of the day". They also include links to the standards they use, and an experimental space for new users.

Extensive use of hyperlinks is a distinguishing feature of Wikimedia, making them more interactive than standard articles or other pages of text. For this reason, I kept the links in both previous definitions. In this way, it took only four clicks/links to go from the homepage to the Wikipedia article about "play as therapy" for small children. Linking so many unrelated articles this way has led to Wikimedia being recognised as a massive, though useful, time sink, both for users and contributors. The way that different Wikimedia entries link to each other also forms a very well-connected data empire of its own.

Because of their simple design and construction, and the intensity of engagement by the target user community, wikis are popular on other social media. The urban dictionary should get a special mention, since it helps anyone with a net connection to keep up to date with slang, both in a contemporary and historical sense. In the same vein, fandom.com gives as much detail as you can handle about any particular game, movie, TV series, or other pop culture obsession.

In short: Wikimedia are a great resource for anyone generally, but especially those of the information professions. They're free, easy to use and understand, and as thorough as we allow them to be.

What's in the name?

Thanks for checking out my new 'blog, which I intend to use as a personal catalogue of my investigation of information management. It's a surprisingly broad area, which was a bit of a surprise to me when I first started looking at it last year. People originally called it "library science", which I had never thought of as a career path before. After all, there's the old saying that if you love books, don't work in a library, because you'll never get to read them.

The other possibilities are quite broad: I previously worked in an I.T. company selling equipment for 'big data' storage and processing, so that's not something which is going away. Public catalogues and archives are used by all sorts of people, for all sorts of things. I even used the earliest maps of Ipswich from Queensland's State Archives to make Christmas presents last year.

To introduce you to my thinking, then, I want to go through my surprisingly inspired thinking for the name of this blog.
First of all, you might notice that it's a Latin pun: Libera mea, "liberate me".

When I was reading and writing for I.T. blogs, I thought a bit about why people still refer to "libraries" for data. This word itself also has a Latin origin, ultimately from liber, the inner bark of trees [paper]. Because the only people concerned with books for a long time in my cultural/historical context were the Catholic Church, the word libraries stuck, replacing previous English words like "book-hoard" or "book-house". Fun fact: the word libricide was also briefly in use, for the destruction of books, and knowledge generally.

[Side benefit, I get to say that I needed to play a computer game for uni. work. Hopefully, that tradition holds up!]


If you ask me, catalogue [for those of us who aren't American] is a much better word for handling records of various types. It comes from Greek: variously translated as "a reckoning list", "a complete count", or a "record of words". Then again, describing myself as a "cataloguing student" would be even more boring than library/data scientist, or data/information management.

Why libram? It turns out not to be a real word, in an academic sense. It was invented as a deliberately arcane word for a heavy book, since being popularised by media like Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. It struck me as being very appropriate then, to describe a digital/virtual record; in a literal sense, it is not a real, physical object.

I didn't have much interest in blogging honestly before coming up with this title. Here's hoping it's enjoyable for each of us, as we delve into Libram Mea in Terra Australis, my digital rants and data-dumps.