Wikipedia’s article on Enterprise 2.0 has been heavily edited by the administrator Jreferee since July 26. I just read through the most recent version, which consists largely of a history of the term. According to this version,
"Enterprise 2.0 is a term used at least since 2001 to describe a second-generation approach to online knowledge within a business (enterprise)…
The term Enterprise 2.0 was coined in 2001 by Participate Systems, Inc. CEO Alan Warms[5] and grew through its use in business and in industry conferences…
By April 2001, both the Web 2.0 source term "Internet 2.0" and the term "Enterprise 2.0" were being used in the sense of second-generation online, collaborative general and business communities, respectively. Today, the term Enterprise 2.0 largely derives popular meaning from its use in business and the collaborative technologies conference of the same name…
Five months after BrainGem sought to trademark "Internet 2.0," Participate Systems, Inc. of Chicago Illinois used "Participant Enterprise 2.0" in April 2001 connection with software used to create online collaborative communities.[5] With $33 million in venture capital backing and a series of series of co-authored whitepapers, Participate Systems CEO Alan Warms sought to trademark "Participant Enterprise 2.0" in November 2001 in connection with software to build and manage online business communities using employee, customer and partner knowledge.[24][26] However, the U.S. Trademark Office saw Enterprise 2.0 as being descriptive rather than distinctive and Participate Systems disclaimed "Enterprise 2.0" from being part of its Participant Enterprise 2.0 trademark in February 2002.[26] Nonetheless, Warms pioneering efforts in this area were rewarded by being selected as one of the World Economic Forum‘s 100 Technology Pioneers of 2001.[27]…
Although Alan Warms coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" in 2001, it took until 2004 before enough business implemented collaboration technologies to support a conference.[28] The "Inaugural 2004 Collaboration in Financial Services Conference" was the first-of-its kind conference to address collaboration technologies in institutional financial services.[28] This September 2004 conference focused on creating an industry roadmap to help financial enterprises address the then-emerging collaboration space.[28]…
MediaLive International held Enterprise 2.0 2006 in June 2006 in Boston, Massachusetts and Enterprise 2.0 2007 in Boston, Massachusetts in June 2007.[31]."
My spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration" is cited in a footnote, for which I suppose I should be grateful.
Intrigued by this version of events, I did a quick Google search of the joint terms "Alan Warms" and "Enterprise 2.0." It returned three results. The first two were different views of the current Wikipedia article. The third was evidently an amalgam of two blog posts; one about Enterprise 2.0, and one in which Warms posts a comment.
As I was writing my Sloan Management Article, I did some online searching to see if the term "Enterprise 2.0" was already used to describe anything like the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches behind the firewall. As I wrote here:
"I thought I coined the phrase ‘Enterprise 2.0′ but tag searching on Technorati shows me that the UK Internet consultant Stuart Eccles posted about ‘Enterprise2.0′ on February 20, 2006. My first post on Enterprise 2.0 appeared on March 24, 2006."
Eccles is not mentioned in the current version of the Wikipedia article.
Does anyone have a good explanation for why this particular Wikipedia article seems to remain in great flux instead of converging, despite the pretty clear record? Because I honestly don’t.
One bit of encouraging news as we head into the weekend: the phrase "Enterprise 2.0" is now popular enough on the Internet to appear in Google Trends!
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Professor McAfee – good post. I took some time to review the article as I have some wiki experience myself (about the same number of edits as Jreferee).
It appears that Jreferee has a wealth of information about the emergence of Enterprise 2.0. I agree with the changes to the lead paragraph, as coinage is not pertinent for an introductory paragraph.
However, the sources he has cited as originally using Enterprise 2.0 are to very old documents with no link (therefore not easily verifiable). Furthermore, s/he did not leave a comment on the talk page about the major change, nor a good summary of the changes.
So, in my opinion it looks suspicious. It could be an attempt at improvement or just a quick history rewrite.
I posted my question on the talk page, lets see if we can’t get this going and use transparency as our guide…
How about the Madness of the Individual inside The Crowd? To be perfectly blunt, this is yet another example of how Wikipedia consistently fails, attempting to re-write history as a new ‘truth’ when in reality it is creating another fiction. I for one don’t want to be part of that world because it is both ethically and intellectually bankrupt.
“Does anyone have a good explanation for why this particular Wikipedia article seems to remain in great flux instead of converging, despite the pretty clear record?”
Controversy. That tends to cause flux.
Dennis – i take umbrage at that comment. In nice words it “throws out the baby with the bathwater”. Please, don’t forget that this newly minted term and its associated page is but a tiny part of the 1.9 million articles that make up Wikipedia.
The article itself is being critically and seriously looked at based on its merits, and not based on its popularity. If you had looked at the arguments and discussions taking place you would see so (due to its transparency)
Also, if you notice the article has now been redirected to “Enterprise Social Software” a much better article, possibly better title, and clearly gives credit to Professor McAfee.
Still all of this is recorded in the history of the site and can easily be read, reverted, and built upon.
Well, If wikipedia fails, we all fail -If i can’t see me as part of the problema then I cannot view me as part of the solution as well. It seem to me that we are watching a process of knowledge self organization here, not responsability of a single person. The comment posted by robotchampion about doccument not easly verifiable suggest just that in the knowledge creation process.
According to google Enterprise 2.0 kicks the but of Enterprise Social Software you win!
The fallout of “2.0″ references has really hit the point where they all just mean “new”, as everything, whether it be enterprise software or just a consumer/user driven picture sharing application can claim even the smallest piece of “collaboration”. As long as the user is able to contribute a comment or obtain a profile to describe themselves, 2.0 has become an acceptable description of that feature, which in my opinion takes its novelty and usefulness away… Its almost as played out as “Beta” has become.
I’d second Seth Finkelstein’s comment that the reason the Enterprise 2.0 entry gets so much scrutiny is because the term is controversial. And would add that Wikipedia’s articles on business IT topics get a lot of scrutiny because a large percentage of its editorship is IT-interested and IT-savvy, if not indeed employed in IT. Wikipedians tend to be knowledge workers, and knowledge workers use and know a lot about electronic media these days.
Pick an obscure, non-IT topic, though, and the experienced Wikipedians tend to leave you alone, as long as you follow the basic rules. To learn how to contribute to Wikipedia, for example, I decided to research and write about the 9th Indiana Infantry, a Civil War regiment. To this day, only a few people besides me have edited this entry, and these have only been minor conformance edits, infobox insertions, etc. One thing did surprise me–a bot inserted a notice in the page that I hadn’t added categories. So I dutifully learned how to do that, and did so. Afterwards, someone reviewed my categories and informed me I had too many–he reduced the category list to one. I assume my list was essentially redundant.
I started this April, and continue to add to this entry, bit by bit, and have fun doing so. It’s a sort of citation-rich, objectified note page on the subject that resides in a place where everyone can see it.
“My spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article” The link seems to be broken, I get 404 error, could you please write the correct one?
We should also remember that Enterprise 2.0 term may be in flux because nobody has been able to completely adhere to Wikipedia's editing standards.
By the way, Google Trends data is quite conservative in comparison to Ad words, for example.
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“Does anyone have a good explanation for why this particular Wikipedia article seems to remain in great flux instead of converging, despite the pretty clear record?”
I think the issue could be with wikipedia. Having said that, I look forward to the emergence of 3.0 soon…
Alison
“Does anyone have a good explanation for why this particular Wikipedia article seems to remain in great flux instead of converging, despite the pretty clear record?”
I think the issue could be with wikipedia. Having said that, I look forward to the emergence of 3.0 soon…
Alison