Wikipedia has become the subject of a Harvard Business School case study written by Karim Lakhani and Andrew McAfee. The case chronicles last year’s debate over whether “Enterprise 2.0” warrants an entry in the online encyclopedia. (The term Enterprise 2.0 was coined by McAfee and refers to the introduction of Web 2.0 collaboration tools into companies.) The case study’s broader context is the battle between the Inclusionists and the Deletionists for Wikipedia’s destiny and, more broadly still, the emergence of the Wikipedian bureaucracy.
I am a contributor to both the German and English Wikipedia and I must say that the “Wikipedian bureaucracy” was one of the things that turned me away from seeking deeper involvement. There are more factions and people you need to kiss up to to get yourself noticed then in the Communist Party of China. I’ve therefore resigned myself to correcting errors in existing articles, which counts as almost nothing on the respectability scale of Wikipedia’s geeks. I’ve also coined a new name for people who think there can be a simple, clear-cut victory for one side in the Deletionist vs. Inclusionist war: Delusionists ;-)
Wikipedia is a great study in commons trashing and management.
Inclusionists don’t mind the ecological destruction (increasing trash) as much as the deletionists do. It is a microcosm of the web – how does anything become vetted when anybody can say anything? There is value in the discipline of peer-reviewed writing. What’s interesting to me is not the tool – wikipedia in this case – but the impact on the community of not being able to trust the tool for certain tasks. If the feedback mechanism needed to create weights and judgements of the content is not designed in from the beginning, can a website based on open postings have any lasting value? What we have here is a fierce disagreement on the value of the tool and on open-ness versus control. It is classic and I hope the Harvard team finds a way to follow this saga as it evolves.