Portmanteau

Just beginning this Wikipedia thing has been entertaining - while reading the page about Wikipedia itself, I followed the "portmanteau" link and learned all sorts of fascinating things about the use of that term for a new word made by combining two others. We can thank Lewis Carroll for this usage - he borrowed the concept of a two-compartment suitcase to describe such created words.

And the fun continues, here is a great cartoon about wikipedia. Everybody loves to laugh at wikipedia, until their assignment is due.

Wiki work

I visited the Oxford Web 2.0 wiki and had a look at the Law Library page under Case Studies. I was happy to find a little bit of work to do - our page had no mention our Facebook presence, so I added an entry for it with a link to the actual page. I need to return and add some information about how we use Facebook, but it's a start.

I will admit here to being a bit of a wiki sceptic - the concept is great, getting everyone to participate and contribute to a central repository of knowledge, but I find that in practice, if you don't have a very focused and energetic group of contributors, wikis can sort of languish, never reaching their full potential.

That said, I love wikipedia, with the obvious caveats about accuracy. If you are just looking for a general idea about something, with a high probability of input from someone who knows what they're talking about, wikipedia is your friend. I imagine that if you are a high profile, controversial public figure, wikipedia might seem like your worst enemy.