Reflecting continued academic interest in the project, an introductory course about Wikipedia from a librarian's perspective was unveiled with an announcement last week on Slashdot.

The course, entitled "Why Wiki?", was created earlier this month by John Hubbard, a librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (Note: the course is not being offered for credit at the university—it is more in the nature of a training workshop.) For the most part, the course is not instructional in the sense of teaching people how to actually edit Wikipedia. Rather, it deals with how to approach and evaluate Wikipedia as a resource, subjects that are naturally of interest to librarians.

The form of the course is essentially a narrated screencast in which Hubbard navigates through various examples of the concepts he discusses. Among the many Wikipedia articles looked at, he mentions in passing Heavy metal umlaut, the subject of perhaps the first-ever Wikipedia screencast (see archived story).

Many of the examples serve to illustrate general points or summarize Wikipedia's history, so they remain applicable despite the constant flux of wiki editing, but there is one interesting exception. While discussing disambiguation and naming conventions, Hubbard notes how the "University of Wisconsin" article is dedicated to a single campus, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The matter is of some personal significance to him as an employee at a different campus in the University of Wisconsin System. The situation has been changed in the past month, however, so that "University of Wisconsin" is now a disambiguation page.

The course is in four parts, beginning with an introduction to wikis and Wikipedia. The second part focuses on the various challenges facing Wikipedia and controversies surrounding it. The third section is devoted to comparisons with other sources, but appears to have been posted incomplete. Finally, the last section explores the remaining Wikimedia projects along with other wiki sites. The entire video lasts for approximately one-and-a-half hours.

Although suitable for a wider audience, the course occasionally touches on matters of specialized interest and targets librarians specifically. Hubbard cites a poll of librarians that was roughly evenly split on whether they would refer patrons to Wikipedia. While not advocating a particular stance regarding Wikipedia, he suggests that librarians should be more active in this new technology generally. He also recommends the LISWiki, a wiki dedicated to library and information science.