wikid

This was a fun assignment. I'd used wikipedia many times but never taken the time to read about it's history or how it operates, though I had a general idea. After reading/watching the assignments I explored the French version, reading about Racine's sister city, Montelimar, France. On the wikipedia article there were links to all Montelimar's sister cities and I linked to Racine (still in French). I noticed that there was no photo, but rather a mention that they would welcome a photo so I emailed a couple of people at the RCCVB who went to Montelimar last year and suggested they might want to send/post one. In perusing the list of "Residents Notables," I was amazed to see the name "Max Hardcore--pornographe." Surely this was a cruel joke! Mais, non! The porn star's name also appears on the English language edition and further exploration on the internet seems to corroborate his Racine roots (though one place said he was from Racine, Illinois, which doesn't exist). By that time my internet searches were starting to return some rather questionable hits, so I went on to the safer ground of the assignment, looking at Racine county communities articles, and found a link to RPL on only the city of Racine article. Were there more I missed?
I decided to try creating a wiki, using pbwiki. The one I did was a planning tool for a program the HOLA team is working on for Hispanic Heritage month. While those of us in the library could have used googledocs for this, there are a couple of people in the community who will be involved in the planning and since they don't have google accounts a wiki seemed like a better way to go.

I like the idea of a library creating a community calendar, events, info-sharing, wiki. Always was disappointed that the library world has not been more of a leader in this type of activity. Seems like we should have been there to take up the slack when Party Line folded, but, no, we let the JT beat us to the punch with Glad You Asked. YPR created a community calendar, beyondyourdoor.com, but the posting wasn't as open as it could have been and apparently it didn't catch on--or perhaps it caught on too well with lots of postings that the YPR community wasn't interested in, since it is basically defunct--still exists but only Racine Theater Guild and RAM have anything posted in June and the rest of the summer is completely empty. Of course this sort of project doesn't run itself. Somebody has to be creative to get it off the ground and also have the time to maintain it, supervise postings, and weed outdated stuff. Would that be one of us?