infoarch

It's been a while ago I wrote about an interesting piece by Larry Sanger on the Edge blog . That article questioned "the "epistemic egalitarianism" adagium of Wikipedia." In my words: "everybody is equal, an expert is not more (knowledgeable) than a non-expert, together we define what it true." This article by Sanger and my post about it, popped up in my mind when Wikipedia changed its policy so "the unwashed masses will no longer be able to directly edit the profiles of famous living people", as Chris Wilson phrases it on Slate . Of course this move was widely debated. The Slate article gives a nice summary, as does the NY Times . My first thought about this move is nicely stated by Wilson: No matter how you spin this new policy, there's no getting around that it gives more power and control to a small group of people. But if this were a big problem, Wikipedia would have flopped a long time ago. As I've argued before, the encyclope...

It's been some time ago I told Wikipedia is working on its usability . Now we can see the first steps . As I said before: this is very significant for enterprise wiki adoption. The platform underlying Wikipedia is Mediawiki. Mediawiki is a much-used platform in companies. Lots of people find Mediawiki hard to use. Now the interface has improve, adoption by a broader group of employees is near! --- If You Read This and Like It, Tweet This to your Followers: User-friendly Wikipedia, Encourage Enterprise Wiki Adoption [shorturl] #wiki Tags van Technorati: wikipedia , wiki , adoption

My Dutch newspaper ( NRC , Dec. 18, 2008) had a nice short article with very interesting content (- no link available, so I'll provide source link). The Journal RNA Biology is now requiring papers to be peer-reviewed twice. Once on Wikipedia . And once by the journal's own review panel. A summary of the paper must be submitted to Wikipedia first, before the paper is published in the journal. I think this is good for the scientists wanting to publish an article. Who knows what kind of interesting corrections and extensions will be made to the central thought of their paper. And it's also good news for general public as well. Expert information (on RNA in this case) is published publicly and shared with us all. It would be nice to see other journals open up as well! I was also thinking this could or should be applied inside companies as well. In most companies employees write reports and they're submitted to an archive or document management system, after being fo...

Good news! Wikipedia is going to work on its user-friendliness. (Refer to Marie Jose Klaver's post (in Dutch), Wikimedia's post .) My first reaction was: great. Then I read some critiques on this move and thought: that's an interesting perspective. Making Wikipedia easier to use, could lead to lots of clutter and more edit-wars... Why I'm happy is because I'm thinking from a corporate perspective first. We are using the Mediawiki platform (on which Wikipedia is built) for our enterprise wiki's. Although they are much-used in R&D, we see that less-tech-savvy employees would rather have a more user-friendly (mostly relating to a WYSIWYG editor) interface. So, from a company perspective I'm really happy with this and hope this will encourage our employees (and other companies) to use wiki's more often. Tags van Technorati: wiki , wikipedia , mediawiki , enterprise 2.0

Insightful post on the 'Grow Your Wiki' blog , clearly describing the difference between internet and intranet wiki's. And the difference between ecm and wiki's.

Some time ago I commented on an essay by Larry Sanger titled "Who says we know" . In short the essay: ... questions the "epistemic egalitarianism" adagium of Wikipedia. Simply stated: everybody is equal, an expert is not more (knowledgable) than a non-expert, together we define what is true. I went on to say: I understand the point he's making. And, though I too am enthralled by the success of Wikipedia, I also wonder how Wikipedia will solve, for instance, the "edit wars", that Sanger also mentions. Don't we need a mediator/expert to end those wars? Or can we simply allow two definitions to one entry? Another solution could be to get in between Sanger and Wikipedia. Every now and then we would let experts in Wikipedia and have them correct, extend, etc. the entries. After they've come in, we let "the rest of the world" in, etc. In this way we have expert and non-expert "waves". Well, it seems Veropedia comes clos...

In my Dutch newspaper, NRC , an interesting article about wikipedia mentioned an Edge essay by Larry Sanger : "Who says we know". The essay is long, but well-written and worth the read. I was surprised to run into the essay in the newspaper. Did I miss all the discussion about this essay? Or is everybody still thinking about it's contents? Basically this essay questions the "epistemic egalitarianism" adagium of Wikipedia. Simply stated: everybody is equal, an expert is not more (knowledgable) than a non-expert, together we define what is true. Sanger's main critique is that "Wikipedia, places Truth in the service of Equality." And if he had to choose between the two he's "on the side of Truth". This does not imply that Sanger is against Wikipedia or that he doesn't see all the good Wikipedia has brought. But he'd like to see a more prominent, distinguished role for experts in Wikipedia. I understand the p...

Just a week ago I contributed to Wikipedia for the first time in my life. Quite exciting! I wrote an entry for "knowledge mapping" , based on a definition used in several papers I contributed to. I also added 'knowledge mapping' to the "knowledge management" entry. I was (and am) very curious what would happen with the entry. So, I put a "watcher" on the entry, but that didn't seem to work (no alert that the entry was changed or moved...). Today I checked my entry and to my surprise I was redirected to the entry "knowledge management". My entry was removed and incorporated in this entry for several reasons (refer to "discussion" page of the entries). That wonderful! Within a couple of days this topic, that was missing in the knowledge management entry and in Wikipedia all together, now exists! Samuel