Wikibiccie

Coutesy of Pen Waggener

Wikibiccie would be a site devoted to biscuits.  It would be a truly encyclopaedic place to learn about every conceivable tea-time crunchy treat (cakes excluded, I'm afraid).  You would even be able to go to some far flung land, discover a tasty treat and add an entry.  If you hold invaluable resources to add to the age-old Jaffa Cake debate, which was always bound to be controversial, you can share them with the people who want to know.  Unfortunately for all users of the world wide web, wikibiccie is not a reality.  It's a fantastic idea that I just made up (though I think it has potential - watch out when I learn HTML at library school!)

What would tell you that wikibiccie allowed you to add your own biscuit entries and edit other peoples?  One word: wiki.  It has become a universal expression of interactive publication.  Oxford English Dictionary defines 'wiki' it as

a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content.

It is a way of publishing material that utilises the perceived wisdom that more heads are better than one.  The best possible content will arise through a collaborative community of authors who can add, edit, delete, flag and insert additional sources.  On this blog I can publish an outrageous lie:

The 23thingscity project has been running since June 1972.*

All you can do is comment and tell me I'm wrong.  If this was a Wiki you could actively participate and change that defect.  You would be improving the quality of this blog, which really demonstrates that wikis are more useful than blogs.  The revisions are also open to be viewed, so that major alterations are glaringly obvious.  This time trail can be very useful when assessing the quality and reliability of the source.

If you have ever edited Wikipedia then you'll know there are many tags to navigate in order to format the wiki correctly, which can be learnt quite easily but takes some thought when you first get started.  The gift of many other wikis, such as UK Library Blogs, is that they are much simpler - writing a wiki is just like word processing.  I have added my blog to their list.

*the correction to this outrageous lie would be that 23thingscity began in June 2011.