Looking into wikis at BW

Portland OR is one of the best places anywhere to have a beer - enjoy!

The "Great LA Times Wikitorial Disaster of 2005" helped some thoughts congeal in my mind...

First, a wiki is simply one-specific approach to the concept of "collaborative editing". You might consider a tiny bit of research on that general topic as background.

I've come up with what I consider to be the five levels of collaborative editing, in terms of the level of coherence that you can expect:

1) Tightly-knit "project" group within an organization. By definition, everybody's on the same page.
2) Loosely-knit group within an organization. Differing levels of interest, varying objectives, but still "in the same boat". This would include different departments that are impacted by a project.
3) Unaffiliated persons but with some common goal. A great example would be a global open source software project, or maybe even the Wikipedia itself. This could also include collaboration between an organization and its customers (such as a user group).
4) Fully-open, but open-minded social-level efforts. The Wikipedia does at least overlap this level to a large, but not exclusive extent. Random users can in fact add wholly new topics or edit existing topics, but "the community" does some amount of self-policing, in large part due to common goals and a significant level of shared values.
5) Unconstrained, wide-open, chaos. Anything goes. No attempt at moderation. No common goals. Disparate and conflicting values. Very wildly varying quality. Plenty of dissension. In a word: Dysfunctional. Example: The Great LA Times Wikitorial Disaster of 2005.

In short, pick a topic that should have significant, common interest, minimal passionate dissension, and be prepared to do some moderation.

In particular, a "real person" moderator (or team of them) needs to sense when there is dissent and when "forking" may be required and set up some linguistic structure so that all parties can feel that their legitimate disagreements are being supported in a purposeful manner.

The emphasis should be on enabling and encouraging collaboration, not a no-holds-barred free-for-all ala the aforementioned "disaster".

You might want to consider an internal wiki before unbarring the gates and letting in the wolves. Sounds like a lot of work, though.

-- Jack Krupansky

My political party has been a user of SocialText for some months and we can only recommend it. There are of course some issues associated with trying a wiki approach, but once you have achieved the 'critical mass', it will go quite smoothly. We have yet to achieve that critical mass ourselves, so it proves that there are no quick fixes to anything.

Raymond,
Norway

I would use wikis to collect the shared wisdom of the crowd and I would use them before, not after, the story is done.
So let's say you wanted to collect the 10 best ideas for managing problem employees. Use a wiki to let people create that list and then publish it. It's not a poll. It's not a survey. But is a snapshot of collective wisdom.

This situation in the Times was very upsetting to me, as I love wikis and hated to see them get slammed essentially because they were misunderstood.

First, I don't think an editorial is a good subject for a wiki, perhaps a news article would be better. Second, readers need to understand that a wikied product holds much of its value in the page history and previous versions. Without at least glancing at those, you can't grasp the dynamics and evolution of the end result. Finally, people need to be comfortable fixing spam and other problems. If the next reader always reverts back to the previous version after a clear spam attack, then the wiki will remain well maintained and usable. If the editing page has a field to describe your changes, and people understood that undescribed changes look suspicious in the history log...then things would be in even better shape.

In short, a wiki done well could work wonderfully. But a half-hearted wiki put together badly will only discredit this fantastic tool even more. Please proceed with caution, but please proceed.

I blogged about the Times fiasco at http://digbig.com/4dsss

It seems that 90% of your cover stories would make for interesting, ongoing, "collaberative editing" experiments.

McGraw-Hill and BusinessWeek are regarded as creme de la creme by many of us. As a long term fan of you guys, I'd hope that something unique emerges from your endeavors.

If done correctly, something will emerge that is more than the "wiki" concept we currently struggle to define. The "tool" will disappear. People won't be drawn to the BusinessWeek "wiki", they'll be drawn to "BusinessWeek".

Can you point to the wiki right now that adequately gives me knowledge about the "10 best ideas for managing problem employees"? Why hasn't it "emerged" from the collective wisdom of the crowd, and if so, why can't we easily find it?

If a futures market existed on this concept, it seems that we'd want to do it in a manner that maximizes the value of BusinessWeek concepts relative to other non-businessweekian concepts.

So what will differentiate the Businessweekian implementation (BWeeki) from the nonBWeeki? Let's not forsake the BW legacy and utilize that to somehow bless (filter, moderate, etc.) certain aspects of the chaotic wisdom of the crowds.

I wish that I understood more about these things -- your discussion about wikification resonated so well with me because of my earlier wish that BW would present information in an ongoing Wikified-like manner concerning the "Sinkhole" cover story you did a few issues back. That article seems to highlight an example of a continually worsening situation that could potentially impact all of us.

Here's a nicely summarized example of varied formats(?) effecting contextual differences in one particularly "hot news" item - http://interimtom.blogspot.com/2005/07/three-views-of-context-in-news.html

The wiki format (despite some weaknessess that may not have been addressed here) is clearly superior, isn't it?