User:LIB105WCC

This Wikipedia account created in Fall 2011 is setup for students in the Library Technical Assistant Program at Waubonsee Community College to select, *evaluate*, organize, present, and link library information to the WWW. Students are reminded to evaluate all Wikipedia content for accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, coverage, and relevance. Also required are complete and correct citations for any source used.

It will be used by classes including LIB105 Introduction to Library Technical Services and LIB115 Library Public Services to crowdsource a Wiki Text Book of articles related to library work and customer services.

Based on a blog article posted on May17, 2011 to Bibliographic Wilderness titled: using wikipedia as an authority file by jrochkind, LTA students will consider the questions posed:


 * What if instead of maintaining our own subject and name authority files, we simply used wikipedia *as* an authority file?
 * Would this result in as good subject access as our current library controlled vocabulary efforts?
 * As stated in the blog: It would potentially make our data more interoperable with other data sources. (and asks further) What other upsides or downsides do you see?

Karen Coyle clarifies in comments on May 19, 2011: Isn't that we mean by linked data? Essentially any entry point on the web can be a link to your data if we share our identifiers and make some inferences about things being the same. It's not that Wikipedia *becomes* our authority file but that we would eliminate the separate between Wikipedia and library data.


 * She further observes: We could continue to have our own authority files if we wish, but our data could *also* be fully interactive with Wikipedia. And if we do it as *linked data* this will be true not only with Wikipedia but with any other dataset with which we share identifiers.