EchoDitto

Michael and I attended RootsCampDC this weekend. It was an amazing conference with an equally exciting vibe. The attendees were all remarkable people with great stories and experiences to share. They included 2006 campaign workers fresh off the trail, a candidate for U.S. Senate and leaders of the netroots community.

The idea of the conference was to bring these ideas together to progressive ideas to reality, and I think it really worked. The sessions I attended were filled with lively discussion and some great ideas were shared.

I have to be honest. Despite my line of work, I still haven't entirely quaffed the wiki kool-aid. Blogging is one thing, but something about a reference source that's editable by anybody makes me a little wary. John Seigenthaler, Sr.'s story only reinforces that wariness.

Jeremy Wright has posted a list of the Fortune 500 companies with blogs. He counts any type of blog -- internal, external, product, etc -- as sufficient for a company to be included in the list. Jeremy, thanks for keeping us all up to date. (Assist to Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion)

There is also TheNewPR/wiki that's keeping track of corporate blogs (listed by type of corporate blog as well) and other PR related developments.

I came across today an article written by Robert McHenry, the former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Brittannica, about his reactions to the Wikipedia, or what he calls the "faith-based encyclopedia":

...The Wikipedia project is flourishing. As of November 2004, according to the project's own counts, nearly 30,000 contributors had written about 1.1 million articles in 109 different languages, though some of these language versions of Wikipedia remained quite small. The Manx Gaelic version, for example, had only 3 articles, the Guarani 10, and the Klingon (yes, from the Star Trek series) 48. The largest, the English language version, contained over 382,000 pages that were thought "probably" to be encyclopedic articles. (The "probably" tells as much about the limits of Wikipedia's oversight as any single word possibly could.)

All-in-all, it's not a very flattering piece, but you can't help but a get a sense that he just doesn't "get" it. The whole piece is written with a patronizing tone that sees the Wikipedia only as a distraction from "real" reference sources. He points out problems in a few entries and uses that and the Wikipedia's instructions to damn it as a "reliable" tool.

But that's not really the point of wikis. They're not meant to be perfect right out of the box. They're "open source," collaborative, and iterative knowledge, just like the heart of the internet. They represent millions of people coming together and pooling their talents towards a greater (non-commercial) goal. Wikis are an exercise in the shared humanity of the world, and that's something you're never going to get out of a "closed source" solution like Encyclopedia Brittannica.

What's more interesting, though? If you go to the Alexander Hamilton entry that McHenry specifically picked apart, you'll see that the errors he pointed out have already been fixed. I don't know whether he fixed them or someone else did after reading his article, but the wiki world is self-correcting and it's always possible to edit away.

No, the wikipedia isn't perfect, but every day it is getting better. Just look at how far it's come in three years, and imagine what it'll be like in ten years. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the massive Encyclopedia Brittannica's first editions in 1768 weren't the be-all-and-end-all of knowledge then either.

(If you're looking for more information on wikis, this is as good a time as any to unveil the EchoDitto Wiki page. If you have a favorite wiki, let us know and we'll add it below.)

Today, Wikipedia announced the publication of their 1 millionth article. Mabye it signifies the breadth and depth of this groundbreaking online, collaborative endeavor. Maybe it's just another milestone to toast and make a bet with your friend when they will hit 2 million.

A toast to collaboration!

David Weinberger points to a rumble going on at Wikipedia over the George W. Bush page. Democracy, meet meta-Democracy.

I can only hope that the EchoDitto page on DisInfopedia will cause similar controversy one day.

I've just added a Wiki blog category.

The Washington Post reports on the success of of Wikipedia today. The article itself is nothing new, mostly comparing the communitarian nature of a wiki with the tightly edited nature of a traditional encyclopedia. But we've been thinking a lot at EchoDitto about how you might use wiki technology for something a little more structured than "A Big Encyclopedia About Everything."

From what I've seen, the folks over at Disinfopedia seem to have some idea how to introduce structure and - get this - some level of organizing into the wiki process. It's clear that wikis aren't going to be the tool we can use to get activists doing all sorts of real-world activism. But we can get a lot of activists to do a lot of research to build the store of information we need to make our real world activism most effective.

We've been talking a lot about wikis in recent client meetings, so I was particularly interested to read this blog entry today on the Wikipedia vs. the Encyclopedia Brittanica (via BoingBoing.net):

Princeton University: Both entries are accurate and reasonably well written. Wikipedia has more information. Verdict: small advantage to Wikipedia.

Me: Wikipedia has a short but decent entry; Britannica, unsurprisingly, has nothing. Verdict: advantage Wikipedia.

Public-key cryptography: Good, accurate entries in both. Verdict: toss-up.

Microsoft antitrust case: Britannica has only two sentences, saying that Judge Jackson ruled against Microsoft and ordered a breakup, and that the Court of Appeals overturned the breakup but agreed that Microsoft had broken the law. That's correct, but it leaves out the settlement. Wikipedia's entry is much longer but error-prone. Verdict: big advantage to Britannica.

Overall verdict: Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.

My question: Who wants to write the Wikipedia entry on Nicco?

No original content in this post.

• Cosmopolity and Dave Winer's ConventionBloggers.com aggregate lots of bloggers covering the RNC in NYC. Me, I want to know how the Viking Protests went.
• Ross Mayfield sums up recent interblog discussions on the reliability of collaboratively-written encyclopedias like Wikipedia and Dkosopedia.
• Jason Kottke looks at the recent activities of Google Inc., and suggests that GMail is their first step towards building an all-pervasive Google "Operating System".
• Me, I just scribbled a few excerpts from Hunter S. Thompson's ramblings on the 1972 presidential race that remind me of 2004.