Episode 5: Bringing a Wiki to Kazakhstan
September 10, 2007Why am I in Kazakhstan again? The purpose of this trip is to spend three days leading a workshop for librarians that is titled “Web 2.0 – Library 2.0: Citizen-Powered Information”. There is a kind of craze underway. It’s this Web 2.0 buzz. Some folks think it is hyped beyond all due measure. Others see a fundamental change underway, indicated by such trends as the rise of wikinomics.
With the help of a dedicated translator, who is a PhD student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and a web- and wiki-talented Russian-speaking PhD student from Pitt’s School of Information Sciences (SIS), we created a wiki in Russian using free software. It is focused on Web 2.0 – Library 2.0 for the Information Consortium of Kazakhstani Libraries (ICKL). My goal is to help the ICKL launch the wiki as a formal project linking librarians from across Kazakhstan and the rest of Russian-speaking Central Asia. My hope is that they will use this platform to build skills and a shared knowledge base.
As Chair of the Library & Information Science program at the University of Pittsburgh, I wanted to send official greetings to the students and wish everyone a good seminar with Dr. Shulman.
I am looking forward towards seeing that Wiki grow. It may be an interesting point to make that if its users want international participation, they should consider translating part of their wiki into English – or at least making an English ‘about us’ page.