More Wikipedia
Well, I was editing the page on H. Orton Wiley on my reference shift today. Wiley wrote the theology for the Church of the Nazarene, and also was one of the founders of the University where I work. We have most of his manuscripts, correspondence, and a lot of miscellaneous other documents that he produced in our archive.
As I was doing this, my boss walked by, and wouldn't you know it? He got all antagonistic toward Wikipedia!!! I told him, "Well, as the current campus archivist, with access to these resources, don't you think I'm a pretty good candidate to contribute?" He says (sarcastically), "Well, I don't know. You could be anyone."
I brought up the point that it is like using an encyclopedia from the reference collection. He says, "Those are edited." I said, "Yeah, but you wouldn't necessarily want to cite from those in a paper." He wouldn't leave it, so I finally said, "I disagree" and that was that.
I SHOULD have said something to the effect of how heavily edited Wikipedia really is.
Later, my director came by and saw what I was doing and was like, "That's great!"
What a polarizing issue Wikipedia seems to be, and this was demonstrated to me quite clearly in about an hour between two different people at work.
I did also want to comment on the article about Expanding Digital Collections. I was really impressed by this article and how strategic the University of Washington's placement of information really was. Some day (way in the future for us at this point) I hope to have some of our archives digitized. Adding a link to the digitized collection and/or some specific digital content to some targeted articles in Wikipedia would be a great way to market that collection and let researchers know what's available. My main complaint about our archives right now are that they are inaccessable. What's the point of having an archive (beyond just records) if no one is using it? That is a whole 'nother debate. All this to say that by adding archival content to Wikipedia (or perhaps some kind of other wiki) I can make my collection more accessable.
