Wikipedia or the Bathroom Wall?

Here's a very interesting reblog from Nat Torkington, "Thinking in Wikis" from O'Reilly Radar, June 16, 2008. I'm planning to have my classes next year contribute to Wikipedia (the entries on early American fiction and culture are mostly stubs), and I am ordering this book for my class. Check it out!

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 "Thinking in Wikis" by Nat Torkington

I clearly remember thinking, when I ordered my copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual,"this has got to be a new low for O'Reilly. How can it be anything buta waste of a ream of paper?" I mean, "Wikipedia: it's an onlineencyclopedia that anyone can improve". There, what else is there tosay? Throw in the URL and you've got ten words. But having read it,pressed it into someone's hands saying "you have to read this!", and ordered a new copy, I can safely say that it doesn't waste any of its 500 pages and is well worth reading.

Wikipedia: The Missing Manual talks about the invisibleWikipedia?the social and technical structures that you only see whenyou want to contribute. They're what prevent Wikipedia from becomingthe other great social literary institution that anyone can contributeto, a public bathroom wall. It gives practical advice on topics like:how to improve articles, how to dispute something, and dealing withvandalism and spam. It even covers the ever-timely topic of deleting articles and "notability".

Reading it, I was reminded of open source projects. You thinksoftware is what you download until one day you want to contributesomething and then you realize there's a whole community of developersbehind the zip file, people who have their own customs, heroes, andrituals?put a foot wrong and your effort will be wasted. As you workwith them, you go from cursing the stubbornness of these fools whodismiss your work's brilliance as "inappropriate and ill-formed" torealizing "wow, that guy knows more about coding than I do" and thenone day you wake up and discover you've spent two hours with the othermaintainers of the project educating the n00b who submitted aFrankencode hack to put C++ XML editors and Exchange-compatible emailservers into the C timezone conversion library, and you have just typedthe phrase "inappropriate and ill-formed".

So now I have another tool in my toolbox, process-backed wikis. I asked on my personal blog could such a wiki help a nation define its character?,and I'll be looking around O'Reilly for situations that fit. Forinstance, perhaps there's a need for a "books Nat should read eventhough he's already judged them by their covers" wiki ....