Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

For the past two days, I've been a mad wikipedian. I got email from a classmate who knew I'm a wikipedia advocate asking me to talk about wikipedia to a colleague who'd called it "fun, but not scholarly" (I glowed appropriately, and with the necessary caveats and pro/con links); I watched Jon Udell's fabulous Heavy Metal Umlaut: the Movie (go watch! long, contains sound); and I updated several pages.

I found rather sad that the library and information science page, of all things, was in a year-old state of semi-stasis because of the early creation of an anti-academic article. After the neutral point of view was disputed, the page languished, unedited, for a year. I've been editing non-controversial Wikipedia pages for a while, but this was the first page I've ever made changes to with a non-neutral point of view warning. It was intriguing reading through all of the style and etiquette guides to make sure I was going about it the right way.

I certainly hope I don't cause any flaming. There are some interestingly contradictory points of Wikipedia etiquette. The first is that you don't unnecessarily delete controversial points of view, you just cite them so that they are statements of fact ("Bill O'Reilly called Jeremy Glick a coward", rather than "Jeremy Glick's cowardice...") and include opposing viewpoints where appropriate. But the second is that you can't use weasel words: "some people say Jeremy Glick was a coward". The trick with the "library and information science" page is that the controversial content contained some unverifiable statements, namely that practicing librarians and LIS professors are frequently at loggerheads.

I suspect that there's truth in that statement, though certainly not as much as the original article implied. The problem is that once practicing librarians start publishing their disagreements with the academy, they are well, publishing. And therefore somewhat in the academy, or at least in the semi-academic world of self-reflection, publishing, and dissemination. Honestly, do most practicing librarians who aren't interested in LIS even care what happens of library schools once they get out, as long as graduating students are competent to do the work? Library students, now they care, and frequently wish there were more practicing librarians among their professors. I could probably find some evidence of controversy between practicing and scholarly librarians if I spent enough time searching the peer-reviewed literature, but I certainly couldn't find much of the open web (amusingly, several of my Google searches for the great missing controversy led me straight to yarinareth2). Anyway, basic Wikipedia etiquette said that I needed to retain the original author's controversial statements as best I could, but Wikipedia style demanded more evidence than I could find. I did what I could, and weaseled out of it into discussion page for the article.

Sadly, now I've created a complex framework for the page, but it's midnight, and I have to wake up for work in 6 1/2 hours. I'll work on fleshing out the information, but hopefully other people will contribute as well (hint, hint).