Regarding Thing 8 of the 10 Things.
I would say that I use Wikipedia on a daily basis whether I’m at work or not. If I ever want a quick and easy snippet of information on any given topic, I’ll usually go to Wikipedia and see what’s there. Like everyone else, I often end up using it to search for pop culture or historical names, places, events, etc., but I’ll also use it to help me with a reference question if I need it.
When I’m at work and working on a reference question, Wikipedia is almost never the first source I check, but I have no reservations about using it if I get stuck on a question and think Wikipedia can get me on a helpful search thread. The external links and footnotes at the bottom of most of the better Wikipedia articles usually help me to get to other sources where I can verify the information I’m getting from Wikipedia. But hopefully I’m making an effort to double-check information I get from any source and not just from Wikipedia. I understand why people use Wikipedia since it’s so easy and fast, but my feeling is that reference librarians should be able to use other sources available to us with just as much efficiency, if not ease. Maybe there’s a direct correlation to how skilled you are as a librarian and how much you depend on Wikipedia. Someone who knows every single subscription electronic resource backwards and forwards probably doesn’t need to go to Wikipedia that often because they immediately have other sources come to mind when posed with a question. Maybe someday in the distant future I’ll get to that level of expertise as a reference librarian, but in the meantime I’ll be using Wikipedia when I feel like it’ll help. You just have to be smart about using it, like you would with any other source.
So, radical trust? Yes! Just not blind, dumb trust. Does that make sense?
As for how libraries can use wikis, I think some of the examples in our “Discover” portion of Thing 8 are great. Using wikis as specialized, focused subject guides for our community is a terrific idea. The key to any wiki, though, is getting people to contribute to it.
I can also see wikis being used effectively as a community portal similar to what our SkokieTalk/Net website accomplishes. The Davis Wiki is a great example of a community wiki for a specific town, and Toby and I used it in our experiment to create a Skokie Wiki a couple of months ago.
Finally, I think using a wiki as a staff intranet or at least a compliment to an existing, already effective staff intranet is a nice idea for most organizations. At Thousand Oaks Library, a colleague and I started a wiki as an experiment to see if it would work for us as a staff intranet. We set up a wiki and pitched the idea in various meetings to various members of the staff and people seemed to respond positively to it. Again, the key is getting buy-in from your target users, which isn’t easy to do. But like anything, I think if people see something as valuable to their work and life, they’ll adapt and start using something like a wiki.
And, finally (really!), here’s Seth Godin’s interesting take on the Wikipedia gap.