The Wiki Ethos

Wikis are not just new ways of producing interactive web sites: the underlying philosophy of wikis is beginning to have a pervasive effect on society. Blogger Andrew Sullivan has tied Barack Obama’s political success to his mastering of “Facebook politics.” Not only is Senator Obama effectively using MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to disseminate his political message, but he’s embracing the openness and transparency that is inherent to wikis and the open-source software movement, leading some to call him the first “wiki-candidate.” Read the full story here.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, a long time critic of Wikipedia (and rightly so in some cases), has begun to test the wiki waters. EB is now allowing some people to make edits to web entries after a thorough registering and vetting process. This is recent news so we’ll see how this plays out, but to me this seems to be a purely cosmetic move. However, as long as EB, Citizendium and other pro-am wiki models gain readership it will only serve to improve on Wikipedia’s model. Read the full story here. EB has also just begun to allow bloggers and other web publishers to pull content from their site for free, which in my opinion, is a great move.

Many librarians, passionate about accuracy of information, deride Wikipedia for its openness and susceptibility to vandalism. You would think that government intelligence officials would be equally, if not more, passionate about accuracy, since they are generally dealing with more critical circumstances. Why, then, have they instituted a wikipedia-like information sharing system called Intellipedia, complete with Flickr-like image sharing and video sharing capabilities? The CIA’s Sean Dennehy notes, “We are dealing with puzzles and mysteries. Everyone in the community is working on something of vital national security importance. We want to get to the point in the intelligence community where everyone is contributing their knowledge to Intellipedia.” Read the entire story here.

What is becoming quite clear is that the Wiki-way is here for good. How can library folks contribute their knowledge? What do we have that is unique and would contribute to the world’s store of easily accessible knowledge? Our Special Collections and Digital Collections come to mind first. Any thoughts?

Zip it up and zip it out (still using this phrase until i get a better one.)