I commend to any reader interested in the affairs of our professional association this blog post by Brian Kelly on his UK Web Focus blog, Wikipedia, Librarians and CILIP. Brian has been encouraging library and information professionals to get involved in editing Wikipedia. He pointed out that CILIP’s Wikipedia page contained membership information from 2012 and suggested, in keeping with Wikipedia’s neutral point of view principles, that members might like to update it. 

To do so, Brian tried CILIP’s website, but there he could only find annual reports back to 2010. He used the Internet Archive and the UK Web Archive, but without success, and he is now asking members to check their personal archives so that the Wikipedia article can be expanded with full membership information.

I hope this works, and I am checking my own papers, both dead-tree and electronic. Nevertheless, I can’t help wondering why our own website does not contain this information. It is important, because we are accountable both to our members, who should be able to find this basic information on their professional association’s website, and to the public, on whose behalf we regulate the profession. 

There is a saying that the cobbler’s children are always ill-shod. It seems to be the case that our organisation, which should know more than any other about standards of information management, has not applied these to our own website. I hope this can be corrected.