Wikipedia in the catalogue?

Jul 2, 2009

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I learned from Eric Rumsey that the State Library of Kansas includes Wikipedia articles in their OPAC. Here are some examples: http://topekalibraries.info/search/awikimedia. About 15 minutes later I saw that Aaron Schmidt posted on the DCPL Labs site that in a recent survey 88% “of people responded that they prefer the content from Wikipedia in the Catalog.” This is news to me – is this a fairly common thing these days? Would our cataloguing department kill me if I suggested it? 🙂

Comments

2 Responses to “Wikipedia in the catalogue?”

Matthew Thomas

July 3, 2009
I see two potential problems:
1. One of the most important aspects of the items in our collection/catalog is that they have been checked out as worthy. Since the links are to the public article and not to a specific version, it will be changing all the time. This makes it impossible or at least impractical to ensure that what was added originally is just as valuable as what is linked to at any later time.
2. Where do you stop? There are almost 3 million entries on Wikipedia. What do you choose to link to and what will not be linked to? And what about all the videos on Youtube? All the images on Flickr? All the books on Project Gutenberg? Maybe we do, maybe we make a selection… Or maybe instead we add the top-level page to the collection. Or maybe add a quick search of these other collections when searching the catalog.
Olivia

July 6, 2009

The library provides access to things that are not necessarily free online. Wikipedia entries generally appear in the first page of a simple google search, so I’m not sure what the value is in putting them in the catalog.
That is unless we’re talking about this notion of a catalog as a discovery tool that tries to direct a user’s attention and so includes free sources online. Due to the changeable nature of wikipedia I’m surprised people think it’s a good idea to select particular articles for inclusion in the catalog. But then, I’m not a cataloging librarian…