Dear safranot (& safranim), One of the next "Cyberspace" articles I will be writing will be on the topic of Wiki-references on the Internet. I won't go into too detailed an explanation now of what they are or discuss the pros & cons of such sites. I'll save that for the article.
I think it is worthy of a bit of discussion here, though. These Internet resources are multilingual and "open source", which means that anyone, anywhere, at any time, can add, modify or delete any portion of any entry. I think the ramifications of such a setup are obvious, but as I stated above, I will go into that in more detail in my article. My overall conclusion about these sites is that - love them or hate them - they are too large and too popular to simply ignore. Since they are linked to Google (& since Google indexes their entries), the weaknesses of both Google and the Wiki-pages creates a BIG problem (synergy). There's not really a heck of a lot we can do about Google, because Google is NOT "open source" and is dependent on mathematical algorithms. The Wiki pages, on the other hand, are another matter. Not only CAN librarians worldwide change the Wiki-reference pages, I feel strongly that we are professionally obligated to do so. Of the Wiki-reference sites that are out there, I think that the most significant one is the Wikipedia site - a site intended to be an encyclopedia covering every conceievable subject. Its goal is to become the Internet version of the great library of Alexandria. Though we Judaica librarians can't possibly be responsible for every article in every subject area, I think at a bare minimum, we ought to ensure that "Judaica librarianship" topics are well-represented and accurate. By "accurate" I mean spell-checked, checked for grammar and fact-checked. In addition to "Judaica librarianship" topics, we might also want to check the areas of "Jewish authors", "Jewish publications", "Jewish institutions", "Israel" and "Holocaust". There are basically 3 types of activities that we Judaica librarians can volunteer to do for the various articles at Wikipedia : (1) Translate Hebrew (& other non-English) articles that don't have English equivalents into English &/or translate non-Hebrew articles without Hebrew equivalents into Hebrew. (2) Periodicially monitor articles that have already been written to ensure that they meet out high standards of accuracy and objectivity. (3) Modify articles that are too brief and add articles for topics that there are no entries for yet. Examples of new articles that can be written include : Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel Museum, Mount Herzl, Yediot Ahronot, Jewish Chronicle, Dachau concentration camp, Deborah Lipstadt, Jurgen Stroop, Evian Conference, Jewish National Fund, YIVO Institute, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ORT, Hadassah, Spertus, American Jewish Historical Society, Sydney Taylor, Karen Levine, Kathy Kacer, Morley Torgov, Cynthia Ozick, Anita Dimant, Jewish Agency for Palestine, Cyrus Adler, and Yitshak Ben Zvi. Examples of articles that should be expanded include Carol Matas and Ahad Ha'am. I added a very brief article for "Association of Jewish Libraries" (and made a forwarding link from "AJL"), but I'd appreciate it if other AJL-ers could help expand the article. I have an issue of _JL_ at work which has a history of the AJL (written during the 25th anniversary), but I haven't been able to use it yet. B'shalom, Steven M. Bergson __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/ ========================================================================== HaSafran - The Electronic Forum of the Association of Jewish Libraries Submissions for HaSafran, send to: Hasafran at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listserver at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 at osu.edu AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org/
