From my sickbed, here’s this week’s WW.
1.) Go to Wikipedia.
2.) Click on “Random article.”
3.) Report on the outcome.
e-Booking is a shortened form of the phrase ‘Electronic Booking’, and is in common use in Healthcare settings for the use of Information Technology systems to enable hospital appointments to be booked electronically.
It usually refers to the booking of an appointment into one service from another, e.g., from a Primary Care physician to a hospital. It replaces archaic methods of referral which can take a considerable length of time, and offer limited choice to patients.
This is a pretty poor article, and, unfortunately, Wikipedia still has its share of those. It’s entirely unclear, for instance, why the article suggests that e-booking is primarily done in the medical business. The original author of the article appears to be British, though, so maybe e-booking has that particular connotation there. In the States, of course, e-booking probably first came to prominence in the travel industry. (I felt naked the first time I went to the airport with an e-ticket, and I bet you did, too. Naked. Heh.) Anyway, the article on e-booking only mentions travel e-booking as an aside, near the end.
Wait, there’s more. Wikipedia currently contains a different article on eBooking—the kind that occurs without the hyphen, I guess. According to that article, eBooking is “an electronic transaction between a citizen and a government service.” Government services hate hyphens, you know? So there are two articles on this, er, concept, and they’re both overly specific.
For four months, by the way, these two articles have been tagged with a message suggesting that Wikipedia editors consider merging the content. There’s very little interest in that discussion, though. In fairness, it’s hard to imagine who’d be passionate enough about the topic to make it her very own special project.
I’m going back to bed now.
Rivers Are Damp 
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