Do You Wiki?

Wikipedia advertises itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. The idea is that anyone who knows, or thinks they know, about any topic can add their "knowledge" to the Wikipedia encyclopedia by writing an article on the topic. Anyone else can edit the original article to correct errors or add information.

Obviously, because of the potential for error in the short term, you might not want to use a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source, but it would be extremely helpful for background information and pointers to more authoritative sources. Over the long term, an article can become quite accurate and deep because of the multiple sources and self-correcting nature of this "free marketplace" of ideas.

Because humans are very creative and individual experience is so diverse, individuals may have off-the-wall knowledge or applications of knowledge that no one else has, no matter how expert in the field. The Wikipedia can capture this information.

Some corporation are beginning to use wiki technology to capture group knowledge and experience. For example Intel hosts Intelpedia, edited by Josh Bancroft, that is an online, freely-editable enclopedia of terms that are specific to Intel.

How do blogs and wikis compare--both are "democratic" communication tools slowly being adopted by corporations? Blogs are mostly individual expressions with comments by others; whereas, wikis are the soul of collaboration, where credit for who contributed what is less important than the increase of knowledge.

Below are a couple of good articles that explore various aspects of wikis, including wiki technology now publicly available on the Web.

Collaborative Content: How To Make Wiki Content Truly Democratic And Authoritative?. The recent Wikimania conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts fell on the heels of comedian Stephen Colbert's revealing how easy it is to twist Wikipedia content to one's own liking. Photo credit: Bjorn de Leeuw - remixed by Robin Good In spite of Wikipedia's editors correcting his gibberish quickly and effectively, the question of how to get Wiki content to be both democratic and authoritative is not being addressed very effectively yet by Wiki proponents. The enormous potential for collaborative content will go largely unrealized until more effective systems are put in place that recognize how hard it is to defend a democratic publishing institutions from the tyrannies of both the mobs and the authorities.... [Robin Good's Latest News]

The Gilbane Report: Volume 12, Number 10
Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?March 2005
http://gilbane.com/gilbane_report.pl/104/Blogs__Wikis_
Technologies_for_
Enterprise_Applications.html

"...being dismissive of blogs and wikis because of how they are most often used, and talked about, today is a mistake (PCs and web browsers weren’t considered as serious enterprise tools at first either). What is important is how they could be used. They are simply tools, and many of you will be surprised to find how much they are already being utilized in business environments. For this issue, Contributor Lauren Wood provides a straightforward explanation of what they are, describes how they compare with content management systems, and reports on some telling examples of how blogs and wikis are currently being successfully used in enterprises.
See the results of our short survey on enterprise use of blog and wiki technology. More....

David Orr