HBS’s research newsletter, Working Knowledge, has an article today about my experiences with Wikipedia‘s Articles for Deletion process around the "Enterprise 2.0" article, and the freely available online HBS case my colleague Karim Lakhani and I wrote about it.
Sean Silverthorne did a great job asking me and Karim the right questions, then making our responses sound coherent. In addition to asking us about the case study, he also questioned us about corporate use of the wiki technology. This discussion comes at the end of the article.
Take a look and tell us what you think. How big a danger, if at all, are adamant deletionists to Wikipedia? And what lessons should companies take away from this lesson, and from Wikipedia more broadly?
By the way, I notice that as of right now (4:05 pm EDT on July 23, 2007) Wikipedia has separate articles on "Enterprise 2.0" and "Enterprise Social Software." The last time I checked, this was not the case — a search for "Enterprise 2.0" redirected the user to "Enterprise Social Software." I’m happy to see an Enterprise 2.0 article as part of WP. I don’t know if the ‘right’ answer is to merge the two articles or do something else. All I know is, I’m staying out of this one…
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Much to the regret of many, deletionists are essential to an overall process which, fortunately, results in a quality and organization that makes Wikipedia so useful for millions of people all around the world. As I document in Best Practice and the Wikipedia Big Brain, Wikipedia is loaded with structure and is guided by strict policy and guidelines. As was likely the case for the original Enterprise 2.0 page, a page has to reach a certain level of noteworthiness prior to being accepted. That is, in some sense, a reasonable approach, though the line of noteworthiness often seems altogether hazy, making life frustrating for contributors (I’ve been there).
Wikipedia is far from an environment for free-form expression, as you would find in a personal blog. It is for communicating fact, and is restricted to noteworthy facts.
For better or worse, Wikipedia is used as a benchmark model when folks explain “what is a wiki?” However, As you point out in the Working Knowledge interview, and as I concur, a corporate encyclopedia is a good use case, but is generally far from the most common or most important use cases for wiki in the enterprise.
You now rank 3rd for “Enterprise 2.0″ in Google. There are 3 references to you on the Wikipedia Enterprise Social Software article but no backlilnks. You should sumit changes to the wikipedia page and add backlinks if you want to increase your search engine rankings.
“Enterprise 2.0″ as a standalone page is again MIA from Wikipedia – hmmm. Thanks for a fascinating series of articles. Will be watching for more!
I have a strong feeling that Wikipedia may one day become unreliable. Wikipedia doesn’t have a battalion of editors and net police who would keep tracking every deletion or editing a user puts in. One day the world may wake up and realize that it’s no longer intellectually healthy to run to Wikipedia for info hunt.
I have to agree with you Mike. Recently I had to do some essay about some croatian writer and rely solely on wikipedia. When my professor read this paper, he found 3 errors in biography.
Wikipedia\’s business model is bad – it has more than 100 servers and if donations stop somehow it would have lots of losses
Wikipedia is the best source till date for info hunt and if somehow they get support from big companies it will run without any hassles
i must say that the article by sean silverthorne is one of the most informative and insightful nugget of information that i have come across regarding the internal working of wikipedia. Although after reading it i have a feeling that this site is in danger of falling prey to the prejudices of a few volunteers that are managing it. The exclusionists, as rightly pointed out by the author are really putting in danger the whole concept of a wiki where an idea is floated and is refined by people who are interested, or are a party to that information. If the idea is blocked out at its very birth how is it possible for all the parties involved to find out what is indeed the truth? However, being the optimist that i am, i feel that the the stringent guidelines and active support of the online community will enable wikipedia to retain its status as the primary source of information on the internet.
@mike
i disagree with you when you say that it may become unreliable in the coming years. As long as people take interest in wikipedia and as long as it keeps on getting the traffic it gets, people will keep on checking the articles that they are interested/authority in and this interest will make sure that the articles listed are as authentic as it can be on the internet.
@Article Database Admin
As long as people like me keep on getting the info that we want free of cost from wikipedia we would keep on donating money(fraction of the cost of information and the price of hassle) and i do not think that is a very bad business model, maybe u have not noticed that it is an ‘org’ which means that it is doing something for the betterment of mankind and as long is it is a non-profit organization (which i hope it is) people wont have any qualms about donating anyway.
having seen that article(enterprise 2.0) in its infancy i too believe that it was a bit incoherent and vague, therefore a call for revision was in order rather than a call for deletion as the case rightly indicates that a topic having half a million hits should be covered on wikipedia. I guess the people worked on the principles of a ‘weak delete’ to solve the problem because the article is in a better shape now with a somewhat concise defination.
Type your comment here.Nice one. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. Others no doubt will like it like I did.
Type your comment here.Nice one. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. Others no doubt will like it like I did.