Wikidmedia

By now, you have heard of wikis, a writable website -- the simplest way for a group to create a website without having to know HTML. And you have probably come across Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by everyone. And if you are really up on it, you know that my company, Socialtext, provides a wiki platform for enterprises.

Wikipedia is a counter-intuitive unbridled success, with over 300k articles compared to 65k in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Boston Globe collumnist Hiawatha Bray covers Wikipedia with a different angle, quality.

So of course Wikipedia is popular. Maybe too popular. For it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability. Old-school reference books hire expert scholars to write their articles, and employ skilled editors to check and double-check their work. Wikipedia's articles are written by anyone who fancies himself an expert.

Now Hiawatha considers himself, and is, an expert in editorial process. He has a similar view on blogs, that quality matters and readers need to understand what is authoritative. I spoke with him about this article, helped explain how public wikis work and pointed out that quality is subjective. But he also interviews a complacent representative of Brittanica and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and gets at the heart of competition:

"We're in talks with a publisher on doing a concise desktop reference, and that should come out next year," Wales said. He also has plans for more comprehensive printed editions of the encyclopedia. These will cost money, but a lot less than today's encyclopedias, because the writers and editors are volunteers. That means that Wikipedia can be distributed to the world's poorest people at reasonable cost.

"Britannica's out of the reach of your average African villager," Wales said. "But if a publisher can take our content for free and print it, the only cost he has to recoup is the cost of printing."

But no book publisher will print an encyclopedia -- even a cheap one -- if it can't stand behind the accuracy of its articles. "If we go to print, you can't just print out the latest nonsense," Wales said.

This realization forced the Wikimedia Foundation to start work on a formal editorial process for Wikipedia. Wales isn't sure how it will work yet; contributors might still be anonymous. But there will probably be an editorial board staffed with experts in various fields. They'll be identified by name with the Wikipedia, and stand behind the accuracy of its contents.

It's a plan that should give nightmares to traditional encyclopedists. If Wikipedia, pro-duced by volunteers, becomes just as trustworthy as Britannica, and far more comprehensive, who'll need any other encyclopedia?

A few years ago, Microsoft Corp. scoffed at free software; today the company is running scared. Britannica's Ross seems a lot more relaxed about his company's future. It's difficult to see why.

Participatory publishing is a powerful model where the bulk of the work is performed up front as informal practice by the community at greater scale, scope and speed. When you add a process at the end of this production cycle to serve as an arbiter of quality, the result is an extremely competitive product.

Often when we think of Social Media we try to compare informal practice such as blogging vs. formal editorial process. But its the combinations that are disruptive.

Posted by rossmayfield, July 12, 2004 06:24 PM | | TrackBack