Wikis and the Magic of LibraryThing

So I realized that I'm lagging behind on my 23 Things postings so here goes nothing...

I am fairly familiar with wikis.  I've used three of the most commonly used sites in creating wikis:  PBwiki, Wetpaint, and FrontPage.  I prefer Wetpaint but that's just my personal preference.  I started out by playing around with a wiki in one of my classes.  We had to sign up for assignments on the wiki.  It was fairly easy to use and understand.  I ended up liking it so much, I used it in another class as a way to collaborate with my group members without having to drive somewhere and cordinate schedules.  They save me time and money!!!

I currently created one for a professional organization I have become a part of.  Many of the members of this organization were not familiar with wikis.  I did a sort of training for them, found how-to videos on YouTube, and set everything up so that all they had to do was sign up and join the wiki.  It's been a really big hit!  It has cut down on actual meetings we have to set up.  It's a great tool for collaborating at a distance.  I think it can easily be utilized in the classroom as well.  Group projects, student assignments...you name it and it can probably be done on a wiki. 

Now, before about a month ago, I was not too familiar with LibraryThing.  I knew it was a website that allowed people to review books and create their own tagging of those titles.  Recently, my library invested in LibraryThing tags and titles for our catalog.  It was a great move because many of our customers have found these helpful.  However, I think there is room for improvement.  I am an avid Young Adult fiction reader.  Because YA fiction is now becoming a booming industry, no one is really sure how to label the books other than Young Adult.  Titles such as Hunger Games and Life As We Knew It are listed in similar categories as Twilight and Harry Potter.  This is not because they have similar elements but because they are all popular YA fiction novels.  LibraryThing needs to address that YA is not the only tag to place on these books.  Since the tags are user-generated, we as readers need to put more thought into our tagging of titles, particularly YA titles.