This TED talk by Jimmy Wales was informative on why the approach
of Wikipedia’s organization is managed by social policies. His
“Neutral-Point-of-View policy” being the core principle creates a place of
neutrality. From this video, I learned that only about 18% of edits made are by
anonymous users. The rest of the edits are from the community of 600-1,000
semi-professional volunteers who gather in cyberspace to “write an encyclopedia
for fun.”
Open-ended software allows the social method of the human touch to rule. What's interesting about this community is that these people are only regulated by the passion for the quality of the work, not the process; even though their governance model is so confusing that not even Wales can explain it! Community-elected officials, aristocracy and monarchy all play their part in the authority of Wikipedia. My overall impression of this quality control process is that it cannot be constrained to a realistic timeline. Wales mentions that journalists have remarked on how quickly their vandalism of Wikipedia was corrected, but is a system of volunteers reliable when attempting to reach a deadline? This is the main reason why Wikibooks will most likely take over 20 years to complete.
Open-ended software allows the social method of the human touch to rule. What's interesting about this community is that these people are only regulated by the passion for the quality of the work, not the process; even though their governance model is so confusing that not even Wales can explain it! Community-elected officials, aristocracy and monarchy all play their part in the authority of Wikipedia. My overall impression of this quality control process is that it cannot be constrained to a realistic timeline. Wales mentions that journalists have remarked on how quickly their vandalism of Wikipedia was corrected, but is a system of volunteers reliable when attempting to reach a deadline? This is the main reason why Wikibooks will most likely take over 20 years to complete.
Their quality control process is not yet accepted in an academic
setting, but according to Wales, “we’re really interested in all the issues of
the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the
information that they need to make good decisions.” I was most interested in
the last minute of the video when he began to speak more on freely licensed
textbooks, because this is where I personally think that Wikipedia can support
a broader use. The knowledge-base of the wiki-community is not currently
utilized by the academic community, but the birth of a project like Wikibooks
could create broad availability of instructional books, utilizing the chaotic
governance of Wikipedia for a more structured product if it can stick to a
schedule.
I do think that Wikipedia can contribute to the academic
community, but I am not sure of the scope of such a project. Wales mentioned at
5:26 that a German magazine performed a fact-finding comparison of German
Wikipedia to traditional sources. The results: "It isn't perfect, but much
better that what you would expect... Wikipedia is generally superior, though
weak in some areas." Those are vague results from a casual study by a
magazine, but if Wikipedia commissioned regular, fact-comparison studies by an
academic third party whom had access to a university library, this could be a
start of a regular auditing process. There are, however, many pages on
Wikipedia that are not academic subjects. This is why I think WikiBooks is a
more structured idea with constraints to content, which could result in
measurable results.
In project management jargon, everything that Wales explained
could be communicated with: a charter, scope statement, WBS, RAM, Assumptions,
risk management plan, project quality plan, monitoring plan, and change control
procedures. The questionable obstacles would be: cost/labor/duration estimates,
and a schedule since any estimations would be based off of past work.
