LISWiki will be closing, due to lack of participation, on July 1, 2019.

LISWiki:About

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LISWiki was established to give the library community a chance to explore the usefulness of Wikis. It is not intended to replace or detract from the Wikipedia library and information science articles (or those in the printed LIS encyclopedias for that matter), but exist as a niche encyclopedia covering library-related issues. (Just as Memory Alpha, for example, exists as an independent Wiki for a specialized audience.)

The field of librarianship has already benefited from adopting innovative publishing and communication models, such as weblogs and open access archives. Wikis are quickly becoming the next big thing in the field of information. So please, have fun exploring the site. And consider contributing to the new project.

For more information, see:

  • The Ex Libris article titled LISWiki: The First 30 Days
  • An essay on Interactive Online Community Participation
  • A review for LISWiki's First Birthday
  • Why Wiki? a screencast on library Wikis (part 4)
  • LISWiki and the Tragedy of the Non-Commons

Anything library-related is welcome here. This Wiki is designed to be built, edited, organized, and maintained by anyone and everyone interested -- although contributions of inaccurate or off-topic content, spam, trolling, and vandalism are not welcome.

Why not just Wikipedia?

There are certainly overlaps with a subject encyclopedia and a general one; many entries in LISWiki have cross-references to Wikipedia articles. But in fact there are more things library-related to be added and found here than may exist in Wikipedia, such as:

  • Conjecture and other original research
  • Opinion and position pieces not written in a NPOV (with factual information properly presented, of course)
  • Lists, directories, esoteric library information, and non-encyclopedic knoweldge that may not meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria. See Wikipedia's removal of a "Don Saklad" article for example.

As the growth of library-themed wikis demonstrates, there is certainly interest in having specialized coverage!

Statement of "Ownership"

The liswiki.org domain name is registered to John Hubbard, who you can contact with any questions. However this registration does not reflect any ownership rights that could be in conflict with those of contributors as defined above. This project is a non-profit endeavor which respects the privacy of all users and will adopt an open publication license.