Should organisations now put public knowledge and knowhow on Wikipedia instead of publishing it themselves? Views requested.

This 21/7/2006 article in the Times by Ben MacIntyre caught my eye whilst reading a free copy of the Times on a train. It shows the way that Wikipedia is becoming mainstream, and it gets to what for me is a "nub" issue: if I know and care about something, should I contribute to the relevant Wikipedia entry? 

Here is an extract:

The second point is that Wikipedia is here to stay, gradually improving, and growing more influential by the minute. If there is a subject that you know and care about, then it is becoming an intellectual duty to ensure that the entry on Wikipedia is as accurate as possible.

Many years ago, I wrote a book about a Victorian crook called Adam Worth, a subject so obscure that no one had ever written a book about him before, or since. When I found an entry for Worth on Wikipedia, I was at first astonished, then flattered to find the book cited in the references, and then slightly infuriated: whoever had written the entry had plainly read my book and summarised it, but added several small but irritating errors.

At first, I ignored the mistakes. This was only Wikipedia, after all. But the landscape of knowledge has changed since then, and I have joined the club. Wikipedia should always be taken with a pinch of salt. But the more we contribute and revise, the less salt we will need. We are all Wikipedists now.

For me the answer is "it depends how much I care", and as indicated previously, I've  found myself compelled to make several additions and a few changes to Wikipedia's History of VLEs, because I am so narked that Blackboard Inc. seems to have patented ideas and methods that I and loads of others helped in a small way to create, for the public good.

An interesting side effect has been the informal learning that I've done in the process - both about the history of VLEs, and about the way that Wikipedia works.

I'm now pretty well convinced that "the place to put stuff" that might be of value to others is on Wikipedia, rather than, say, on an organisation's web site. Here is an example:

I work half time for the UK's Association for Learning Technology (ALT), an educational charity. ALT has in the past published guides of various kinds, for people in the learning technology community, usually as a membership benefit i.e. we send copies free to our 700+ individual and organisational members, and make them freely available for download. Examples (from 2002):

• Virtual Learning Environments, by Ros O' Leary [0.15 MB PDF];
• Approaches to evaluating the effect of ICT on student learning, by Rob Phillips and Tony Gilding [0.1 MB PDF].

If ALT is now to update these, or produce new guides, it is certainly arguable that producing them either in Wikipedia itself (taking account of what is already there), or using the Open Source MediaWiki system that sits behind Wikipedia, open for the rest of the world to edit and improve, would be of greater utility to a larger number of people, and be much more likely to remain up-to-date, than if we use a conventional publishing model.

I think these benefits would easily outweigh the inevitable loss of control (under either scenario), or loss of direct connection with ALT (under the first scenario). I am particularly interested to get readers views on the question posed in the title to this post, along with examples of other organisations that have taken this approach etc., either as comments to this post, or by email to seb@schmoller.net.

Comments

[George]

Wholeheartedly endorse ALT's adoption of MediaWiki to achieve the benefits you cite. The benefits will outweigh the loss of control and loss of direct connection (paradoxically, the loss of direct connection factor might actually increase members' affinity with ALT).
George

[Paul Bacsich]

Seb - this comment could be to either of your two recent postings on "the Wikipedia effect"

We need to all get better organised on recording, disseminating AND preserving knowledge of e-learning over long periods (up to 14 years to get a software patent through in the US). The current Wikipedia exercise has been fascinating to me in my historian persona, but reminded me how much detail has been lost,mostly "accidentally", from the web.

Better records would help us all - not only to disseminate information, not even only for those who defend against software patents, but also for those unlucky souls who have to do patent searches for prior art. For some purposes they will need legally valid date stamps and to be allowable "publications" within the legal requirements for prior art. This may affect the value of Wikipedia for all the things you would like it for - OK for evaluations but not for systems specs, perhaps.

I think some combination of your approaches would be best. What is no longer acceptable is not to put stuff up or put it up in a way which disappears after a few years because of staff changes and reorganisations. (There is a whole new justification for open content lurking here.)

Interestingly, the UK HE/FE funding bodies and their immediate agencies are not any better than UK universities in puting into practice long-term storage of information. So maybe ALT could take a lead.

Paul

[DJ]

Seb,

There are instances where stuff "might be valuable" to others, but if it is not universally applicable, then "the place to put that stuff" is not Wikipedia.

I'm thinking of guidelines, know-how, rules of thumb etc that might work in one sector but not another. One example (which you will know, because we worked on it together) is the TUC's Online Course Development and Management. It's on a separate wiki of its own. It's not fully open for editing (among other reasons, link spam is harder to patrol if you attract fewer eyeballs than Wikipedia).

I'm sure there must be other, better examples.

Quick response from Seb. I rather buried the same point toward the end of the post ".....it is certainly arguable that producing them either in Wikipedia itself (taking account of what is already there), or using the Open Source MediaWiki system that sits behind Wikipedia,...." but failed to broaden the question on which I seek views in the overal question posed.

[BobWalker]

Interesting and timely topic.
We are tentatively exploring putting some of our College help documentation into a local version of MediaWiki.

Our Education Technology people are keen and have started their own set of pages. They returned from a WebCT(not yet Blackboard) conference using terms such as 'radical trust', and got on board. Our thought was that employees, faculty, and interested students would contribute. We'll see how it goes.

However I'm still not entirely comfortable with the loss of control associated with Wiki documentation, especially with regards to highly detailed or technical information that *I* want to control, but want to give public access. A possible solution is a different Wiki. We are experimenting with TikiWiki, with LDAP authentication, write by group, and open read: Computer Lab Descriptions.

As an aside, another interesting use of MediaWiki as a conference schedule.

Bob.