"Lessig, known for his decade-long role in trying to loosen the entertainment industry's vice-like grip on popular culture by shaping copyright law, is betting that the energy and dissatisfaction exhibited by voters against the status-quo in Washington DC, and the emergence of collaborative software that enables vast numbers of geographically-dispersed citizens to become politically active on their own schedule, will enable a new kind of transparency and accountability in political campaigns."

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"Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones."

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Wikis are useful business tools. With planning and some staff time, you can make your own online collection of useful articles, tailored to your organization's needs, to communicate about business processes, manage collective know-how and more.

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But with the release of Wikiscanner we now find that organizations are actively trolling Wikipedia to help themselves, or to hurt others.   We find that our level of trust in Wikipedia has been significantly impugned.  We find that the social computing model is suspect to abuse from those who aren’t playing by the rules.  In effect, our naïve view of the world of wikis is destroyed.

"Does the world need open-source search tools? The people at Wikipedia think so.

The folks behind the public encyclopedia have launched Wikia, a project to develop a search engine, crawlers and other indexing tools through a collaborative, open-source process."

"Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away—for free—all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites."

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"The first timeI heard about Wikipedia, I thought, This has no shot. Why would highly qualified people devote their energies to an encyclopedia they couldn’t make a dime on?"

-Steve Fox, Editor in Chief, InfoWorld, September 4, 2006

 

As I was heading for bed, I just saw ABC's Nightline story on Wikipedia. Wikipedia uses the wiki application MediaWiki for its content management system. The Nightline story was as close to a fair and balance story on an IT subject you can find on a non-technical program. The story focused not so much on technology as it did the people of Wikipedia, mainly the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and the community of wiki users.

The biggest challenge for the reporter was to explain to television viewers exactly how an open community such as those found on open source projects and wiki sites actually work together. How do 1.3 million articles get written by volunteers? Wales didn't seem to have an answer except to say that all he knows is that it just works.

"Nature ran an article last December where they compared Britannica and Wikipedia on certain scientific entries, and they found that the Britannica articles contained around three errors per article, and Wikipedia articles contained around four errors per article, so when we heard that, we were somewhat pleased, because at least it showed people that it's not completely insane," Wales said.

When I was watching the show all I could think was how do you explain the dynamics of open source communities to those who have never heard of such a thing? How would I explain what the community is all about when I don't think any of us can explain why it works. A very challenging task indeed and I'm glad Wales didn't have an answer...because I think it would have confused the average television viewer even more.