Creating content whether on Wikipedia, in a report, newspaper, or journal article and not infringing on copyright is not that difficult. As long as you cite your source, paraphrase, and/or quote properly, then you’re re-purposing and building on existing knowledge while still remaining within the guidelines of fair use. At least that I would be my understanding.

Your second comment about the fact that Wikipedia is successful because people aren’t paid to contribute implies that the power of the Wiki relies heavily on the altruism of its participants. If I understand your comment correctly, you believe that people only contribute because they believe in the Wiki as symbolizing the greater good. If that’s true, having only those people who are highly altruistic make contributions would mean that Wikipedia and the Wiki concept is actually not very successful at all. It only caters to a specific personality type and ignores those who engage because they as individuals actually gain benefit from their engagements.

I like to see Wikis implemented in such a way where its a win-win situation. I contribute because I want to build a larger body of knowledge and I get recognized for my contribution and learn something in the process of contributing.

Your final comments regarding internal wikis suggest that people are afraid to be bold and in suggesting edits instead of actually making them makes the person “sheepish”.

I believe that in order to be successful, internal Wikis have to exist within a culture of collaboration. Wikis, like Email, and Microsoft Office are merely tools that are supposed to harness a groups ability to record information, communicate effectively, and collaborate. If people are not able to not effective recorders of information, have good communication skills or able to work collaboratively, not amount of tool will help them.

Rather than seeing it as being “sheepish”, I think that proposing a change on a Talk page rather than making an edit is an invitation for open dialogue and conversation. Someone has an idea or concept, not yet fully flushed out and they need someone to converse with them. Remember it’s a “social medium”.

Most organizations exist in a culture where we’re not able to have effective dialogues with one another. Be it face to face or virtually. Our listening skills, our ability to ask questions, and our ability to dialogue are highly lacking. We also don’t place a very high value on these skills, nor the social dynamics, and processes that go into the development of content or an information object. We’re so eager to get to the product that when the journey becomes painful, we forget that we have to smooth the road every once in a while.

The fact that we have meetings behind closed doors unnecessarily for me means that we have not reached a stage where we have the maturity, skills, competencies, patience, and resources to be able to facilitate large group dialogues and to move large groups of people along a path in unison ensuring that we’re all on the same page every step of the way.

On the other hand, sometimes its more effective when a General gives the orders and the men and women march. Each approach has its time and place and we just have to be more open to and effective at choosing the right approach.

I’m not trying to be argumentative, only pointing out a bit of a contradiction and perhaps, just perhaps, an alternate answer to “#5 Objective Criteria”.

You actually touched on the answer in your well crafted question. The reason, I believe, that Wikipedia is so successful is because no one is being paid to provide input and therefore no one has the time nor the money to organise, plan, host said meetings that would be destined to fail (stall out all progress) or result in Groupthink.

A challenge that Wikipedia does not have but that most internal wikis of corporate stature (including government) do is the fear of flying. On Wikipedia, you have but a few ways to submit content. Either you are bold and change the Content page, or you sheepishly propose the change on the Talk page. Either way, you’ve had your say and the world is now your audience. The corporate bully is powerless in this arena.

Switch to the corporate wiki and suddenly those same changes have to be discussed in closed-door meetings; the content carefully crafted so as to reflect the mental image of the most senior official… etc etc.

I took a quick look at the stats and according to WIkipedia for the 684 million vistors in 2008 there were 75,000 active contributors.

It’s really quite amazing what a powerful effect a relatively small group of people can have on a much larger whole.

Your comment also reminds of the “Participation Inequality” article by Jacob Nielsen where he talks about the 90-9-1 rule. (http://tiny.cc/7×6CW)

Imagine at the organizational scale, if we could get 90% of the population benefiting the content created by the 10% who make up the active contributors, then that’s definitely something to aim for.

If I had to take a quantam leap, given the way organizations operate right now, we probably have something to effect of 10% active contributors, 30% audience or lurkers, and 70% who don’t have proper access to the body of knowledge and information created within the organization. But that’s really speculation on my part and not objective fact.

If a system could mine my content and reveal, what my colleague refers to as my “unconscious competence”, then by all means, bring it on.

The problem with knowledge sharing applications a la LinkedIn is their reliance on their users to maintain some sort of profile. This requirement has repeatedly been shown to be the Achilles’ heel of this class of knowledge sharing system.

For example, while definitely worthwhile and interesting, one can’t help wondering how NASA will avoid the data staleness problem with their NASASphere system. Employees are busy (note the 72% of respondent that indicated that NASASphere did not save them time), and it is asking a lot to have them maintain their profile on an ongoing basis.

When it comes to facilitating the identification of experts, a goal of NASASphere, one wonders what would prevent NASA from including an automated data mining component to the system to provide a more comprehensive, up to date and less biased assessment of expertise. This should be feasible, given that NASA’s work is usually publicly available and is highly technical/scientific.

This is the approach taken by ResearchScorecard.com and others. ResearchScorecard uses automated bots to mine “gated” research products of scientists (papers, grants, patents, and soon, clinical trials) available on the public Web to identify and assess the expertise of biomedical scientists, in this case, those operating at Stanford University and UCSF.

Similar to NASASphere, ResearchScorecard’s goal is to help scientists find and evaluate potential collaborators by providing a quantitative portrait of academic researchers in the life sciences. While finding scientists is doable using systems like COS Expertise, SciTechNet and LinkedIn, evaluating them to generate a ranked list a la Google is much harder, and is arguably the more valuable step. Contrary to user-updated systems, a data mining approach that relies on observable data makes it very easy to answer questions such as “find all scientists with expertise in X and rank them according to that expertise”.

So that question becomes, are our teachers failing our children by instilling these values of creativity and sharing and setting the kids up for failure and a huge shock when they enter the modern “knowledge workplace”?

Or are modern “knowledge workplaces” not taking into consideration what types of individuals will be infiltrating their walls?