The blog of Eric Lee - web design and internet consulting for the trade union movement.
Sometimes you don't need a library – you need an encyclopedia
The sharing of information is fundamental to what we do in the trade union movement – and it is fundamental to the Internet as well. But until fairly recently, this is not what we were doing online.
Yes, every union in the U.K. seems to have a website of its own, and each union website (if it's any good) will have a health and section section, or a section about employment rights, or equal opportunities. And of course the TUC website is a treasure-chest full of useful information, as are many other sites closely tied to the labour movement – including the websites of the LRD, Hazards, and LabourStart.
We have created a vast library of information online, but sometimes what we want is not a library. It's an encyclopedia.
Sometimes, we might want to know what "mesothelioma" is, or what are the words to the "Internationale", or who was Keir Hardie, or what is the WTO. And to get answers to those questions we could start looking at the various websites of the trade union movement, and maybe try to find some labour history sites, or current events sites.
But maybe we should start by looking in an encyclopedia.
Now imagine an encyclopedia with over 180,000 articles in English (and many more in dozens of other languages) that is online and completely free of charge. Imagine an encyclopedia that you can contribute to yourself, fixing articles, writing new articles, together with tens of thousands of other volunteers. What you've imagined already exists, and it's called the Wikipedia.
Located at www.wikipedia.org, this extraordinary venture is one of the largest joint intellectual enterprises every undertaken. It has recently surpassed the online Encylopedia Brittanica in popularity.
To add content to the Wikipedia, one simply clicks on the 'Edit this page' link. Today, for example, I created a page about the LRD. It doesn't contain very much content so far, but feel free to add to it.
The Wikipedia is not a replacement for all the web pages we are building any more than an encyclopedia replaces an entire library. But it is increasingly becoming the starting point for many searches for information.
Try it yourself: but I warn you -- it's absolutely addictive.