One quirk of networked books is that they are never done, or rather that they become streams of words rather than monuments. Wikipedia is a stream of edits, as anyone who has tried to make a citation to it realizes. Books too are becoming flows, as precursors of the work are written online, earlier versions published, corrections made, updates added, revised versions approved. A book is networked in time as well as space.
Google is trying a kind of wikipedia development of a knowledge database but rather than going for anonymity is highlighting authors’ names in order to … increase credibility. It’s still in beta/private. See google knols and the screenshot which might make a good pbwiki wiki model.
But why not start a wiki for social change staff to build a similar database of key words/ideas that have relevance/resonance for the programme. It would be a way for students to see the community of practice actually practicing.
From Ruminate
Sounding the death knell for social software applications (and classes of application) is a sport for some prognosticators and bread and butter for the naysayers. Most of the time they are equally wrong. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? But this major upcoming change to the Wikipedia editing system has me tempted to join in.
Technorati reveals no links to the page on Flagged Revisions, but given that Wikipedia’s success (not to mention any number of purported failings) is generally attributed to its open editing system, implementing multiple layers of bureaucratic approvals sounds like a very big deal indeed.
Spinning Wikipedia | Center for Media and Democracy
“Editing
your own entry on Wikipedia is usually the province of vain celebrities
keen for some good PR,” writes Bobbie Johnson. “But a new website has
uncovered dozens of companies that have been editing the site in order
to improve their public image. The Wikipedia Scanner,
which trawls the backwaters of the popular online encyclopaedia, has
unearthed a catalogue of organisations massaging entries, including the
CIA and the Labour party. … But the biggest culprit that the Scanner claims to have discovered is Diebold, a supplier of e-voting
machines, which it says has made huge alterations to entries about its
involvement in the controversial ‘hanging chad’ election in the US in
2000.”
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CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits – Yahoo! News
By Randall Mikkelsen Thu Aug 16, 6:43 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) -People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on
topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.The changes may violate Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.The program, WikiScanner, was developed by Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and posted this month on a Web site that was quickly overwhelmed with searches. The program allows users to track the source of computers used to make changes to the popular Internet encyclopedia where anyone can submit and edit entries.