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March of the Wikis
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, home to some of the brightest people in the universe, and possibly beyond, needs your help.
Yes, you.
The university's Collective Intelligence Laboratory has announced it will launch the first "wiki" project to publish a book. The title will be written by an open community of online contributors like you. Whether you studied at the Harvard Medical School or Harriet's Hairstyling Academy is not important; the project is the ultimate publishing meritocracy, in which the quality of ideas and not academic or professional pedigree are what matter.
For those two or three people who have yet to stumble into the Wikipedia, the mother of all Wikis, some wiki basics are in order. Simply put, a wiki is a type of Website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and edit content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction lets hundreds or thousands of contributors who need not even know or meet one another to collaborate as authors.
The Wikipedia itself was founded in 2001 as an online encyclopedia--with a radical twist on authorship. Unlike the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is written by carefully chosen scholars under close editorial supervision, the Wikipedia lets anyone create or edit an article. The idea is that, despite the fact that any Joe can work on an article, Wikipedia's content is self-correcting because its community keeps a close eye on the accuracy of articles and quickly corrects inaccurate or biased entries.
In sheer volume, at least, wiki publishing seems to work spectacularly well. According to the Wikipedia, there are now 67,000 active contributors working on more than 4,600,000 articles in more than 100 languages. To date, they have contributed 1,457,488 articles in English. By contrast, the Encyclopedia Britannica contains a paltry 80,000 articles.
It also appears that the Wikipedia is as rapidly self-correcting as advertised. In 2005, Esquire magazine writer A.J. Jacobs decided to post a poorly written, error-filled draft of an article to the site. Contributors descended like vultures to carrion. The article was edited 224 times in the first 24 hours after Jacobs posted it, and another 149 times in the next 24 hours.
So is the MIT wiki book, tentatively titled We Are Smarter Than Me, the end of publishing by expert authors in favor of publishing by the masses? Perhaps not entirely. Experiments with opinion articles--"Wikitorials"--have gone less than swimmingly, as might be predicted in the age of Red State-Blue State polarization.
Wikis are likely better suited to creating and revising a factual resource than to commentary and analysis. Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker can probably keep his day job. A buzzing swarm of contributors would likely not have come up with The Tipping Point anytime this century.
Still, it is quite probable that journals and magazines will be organized around wikis, or incorporate wiki-created content. Already Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales has created Wikia, a service to enable user-created Web sites with articles and discussion groups on any subject imaginable. If the Wikipedia is the encyclopedia, then Wikia looks a lot like the magazine rack of the online world.
Publishing didn't used to be rocket science. When engineers from MIT start getting into the act, though, it's time to stay near the frontiers of communications technology.
Those interested in contributing to the MIT project should visit the We Are Smarter Than Me Web site.
Yes, you.
The university's Collective Intelligence Laboratory has announced it will launch the first "wiki" project to publish a book. The title will be written by an open community of online contributors like you. Whether you studied at the Harvard Medical School or Harriet's Hairstyling Academy is not important; the project is the ultimate publishing meritocracy, in which the quality of ideas and not academic or professional pedigree are what matter.
For those two or three people who have yet to stumble into the Wikipedia, the mother of all Wikis, some wiki basics are in order. Simply put, a wiki is a type of Website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and edit content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction lets hundreds or thousands of contributors who need not even know or meet one another to collaborate as authors.
The Wikipedia itself was founded in 2001 as an online encyclopedia--with a radical twist on authorship. Unlike the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is written by carefully chosen scholars under close editorial supervision, the Wikipedia lets anyone create or edit an article. The idea is that, despite the fact that any Joe can work on an article, Wikipedia's content is self-correcting because its community keeps a close eye on the accuracy of articles and quickly corrects inaccurate or biased entries.
In sheer volume, at least, wiki publishing seems to work spectacularly well. According to the Wikipedia, there are now 67,000 active contributors working on more than 4,600,000 articles in more than 100 languages. To date, they have contributed 1,457,488 articles in English. By contrast, the Encyclopedia Britannica contains a paltry 80,000 articles.
It also appears that the Wikipedia is as rapidly self-correcting as advertised. In 2005, Esquire magazine writer A.J. Jacobs decided to post a poorly written, error-filled draft of an article to the site. Contributors descended like vultures to carrion. The article was edited 224 times in the first 24 hours after Jacobs posted it, and another 149 times in the next 24 hours.
So is the MIT wiki book, tentatively titled We Are Smarter Than Me, the end of publishing by expert authors in favor of publishing by the masses? Perhaps not entirely. Experiments with opinion articles--"Wikitorials"--have gone less than swimmingly, as might be predicted in the age of Red State-Blue State polarization.
Wikis are likely better suited to creating and revising a factual resource than to commentary and analysis. Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker can probably keep his day job. A buzzing swarm of contributors would likely not have come up with The Tipping Point anytime this century.
Still, it is quite probable that journals and magazines will be organized around wikis, or incorporate wiki-created content. Already Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales has created Wikia, a service to enable user-created Web sites with articles and discussion groups on any subject imaginable. If the Wikipedia is the encyclopedia, then Wikia looks a lot like the magazine rack of the online world.
Publishing didn't used to be rocket science. When engineers from MIT start getting into the act, though, it's time to stay near the frontiers of communications technology.
Those interested in contributing to the MIT project should visit the We Are Smarter Than Me Web site.
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1 Comments:
AT 10/31/2006 10:12 PM Leigh Slayden said...
Peter, I am truly annoyed to hear that MIT has taken my idea...we have just claimed the URL www.rabbitholepublishing.com as our first digital imprint for a community-developed fiction work, the storyline for which our selected author will launch the start and edit the storyline as it flows. The rabbit hole alludes, of course, to Alice's adventures...stories tend to take on lives of their own, and never so more than when the whole wide world is writing it.
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