wikinomics | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Note: This course is part of the general education requirements for Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

====

A wiki is a great tool that enables groups of contributors to work together to quickly create and edit documents that pool their collective knowledge.

You’ve no doubt heard of Wikipedia, which is (to paraphrase the former Iraqi dictator) “the mother of all wikis.” The richness of this resource, produced entirely by collective voluntary effort, is truly amazing. Check out its entries on the Virginia Tech massacre and the 35W bridge collapse, and you’ll get a sense for the power of wikis to facilitate collaboration.

And these are only two of the more than 2.2 million articles in the English version of Wikipedia. So just how is Encylopaedia Britannica supposed to compete with that?

You’re no doubt already using Wikipedia. In fact, if you Google almost any relatively prominent proper noun, it’s highly like the Wikipedia entry will show up on the first page of results. So that’s one wiki already making your life easier (unless you work for an encyclopedia publisher.)

But how can wikis help you complete your projects?

If you have a work team, you can use a wiki to produce documents much more quickly and easily than you can with a Word document via email.

For example, say you have a 10-member team and you need to produce a two-page document. In the old way (or maybe what you’re doing today), you would produce a first draft and send it as an email attachment to your team members: Ann, Bob, Cindy, Doug, Eunice, Frank, Gail, Hal, Irene and Joe. You play it smart and turn on the track-changes mode, so edits are apparent.

Ann adds to the document, hits “reply all” to the email, and sends her revision to the whole group.
Bob bounces your original directly back to you with some modifications, but doesn’t copy the rest of the team.
Cindy changes Ann’s version and hits reply all.
Doug deletes Ann’s additions and inserts his own, and likewise sends to everyone.
Eunice edits your original and sends it on to Frank for his thoughts on one particular section.
Frank fails to respond, so Eunice’s edits are lost to the team.
Gail groans at Cindy’s changes, adds her own ideas, and copies the whole team on her changes.

So at this point in this illustration you have 52 Word files in various team members’ email inboxes, and figuring out which is the latest version is, well…problematic at least. And even if you can track down the various versions, it’s a hassle to compare modifications in separate documents.

Feeling cross-eyed yet?

That’s why wikis are wonderful. Instead of sending an attachment, you send a link to a special Web site. You and your teammates make your edits in one common place, and each version is saved in the document history. So you capture all of the information, and you as the editor can compare the various versions.

Homework Assignments:

1. Watch a Wiki Video. Honorary doctorate candidates Sachi and Lee LeFever again have an honorable contribution, with their Wikis in Plain English video. See it below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY]

2. Participate in our Class Wiki Demonstration. Visit the SMUG Curriculum wiki, and add your course ideas. This gives you hands-on experience with a wiki, and it also will help strengthen our curriculum.

3. Set up a wiki for your team or some other group. You have options to get these for free, like everything else in the SMUG curriculum. The one I picked for our class project is wikispaces. Using wiki technology to accomplish a practical project takes your experience to the next level.

4. Discussion: Please share your thoughts or questions about wikis, or what you’ve learned through your experiences with them, in the comments section below.

Extra Credit for Honors Students: Read this review of Wikinomics for broader background on the new ways of working made possible by technology like wikis.

wikinomics book review
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, provides an excellent overview of the technologies and trends that are so disruptive in the Web 2.0 world. While traveling today to the Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing East Executive MindXChange, I had the opportunity to listen to the first couple of chapters of the Audible.com unabridged audiobook version of Wikinomics.

I had previously listened to the whole book on one weekend when I had lots of yard work to do. The upside of audiobooks is you can listen to them while you’re doing something else. The downside is it’s hard to take notes when you’re holding a power washer, so it takes a second listen to get maximum benefit. But at least you know where the highlights are.

Let me share a few.

The Wikinomics authors, who also maintain a companion blog and wiki, see four great trends shaping the 21st century landscape:

Openness – As exemplified by Rob McEwen, the CEO of the gold mining company Goldcorp, who made his company’s geologic data available to the world to get bright people from outside his company to help find more gold deposits on company property. By providing the data and $575,000 in prize money, he enlisted more than 1,000 virtual prospectors, who helped find targets that yielded 8 million ounces of gold, turning his company from a $100 million business to $9 billion concern.

Peer production, or Peering – Getting masses of individuals to collaborate openly, as exemplified by Wikipedia. The Apache server and the Linux operating system are among the other varied examples of peer production the authors cite.

Frankly, Tapscott and Williams are too deferential to laments from Bill Gates and others that peer production eliminates the profit-making opportunity for businesses and other purveyors of intellectual property. The answer to that (and the authors should have been stronger about this) is: SO WHAT? (Please forgive my shouting.) There may be economic disruptions and dislocations if open-source software like Linux or Apache displaces proprietary software like Windows, but people like Gates with entrenched interests forget that the ability to make money isn’t a divinely ordained right or the ultimate societal good. What matters to users of software or services is the cost of a product or service and its value.

Businesses exist for their customers, not vice versa. If someone (or an organized group of volunteers, as in Wikipedia) provides a service for free that was previously expensive, that’s a good thing. People can then spend their money to buy other services, so they get the formerly expensive product plus something else, as the societal bonus of Wikinomics.

When the Berlin Wall fell, political leaders and journalists talked about the “Peace Dividend“: if we as a society didn’t have to spend as much money on defense, we could spend it on other good things.

The same is true today. For example, craigslist is a great service for its users, enabling them to place free classified ads (in many communities) for everything from rentals to job postings to personals to items for sale, such as theatre tickets. It’s terribly disruptive for newspapers, which formerly milked the cash cow of classified advertising.

Does it hurt newspapers? Certainly. Is that a problem? If you own or work for a newspaper. Will western civilization crumble because of it? Hardly. Instead of paying several thousand dollars for a job posting classified ad in the newspaper, companies can post to Monster.com for a few hundred dollars, or craigslist for free. The companies can then invest the savings in other areas important to their growth.

That’s the “Wikinomics Dividend.”

The other two trends the authors examine are Sharing and Acting Globally. But instead of discussing them in a post that’s already too long, let me suggest that you get the book yourself.

The key value of Wikinomics is in providing broad trend overviews. The examples used, from Flickr to YouTube to MySpace aren’t the main point. Future competitors may one day render these irrelevant, too.

If you’re looking for the latest new thing, Wikinomics isn’t the place to find it; it is, after all, an old-media tree-killing production. But Wikinomics does give the theoretical framework upon which to build your understanding of changes in today’s economy.

Tag: wikinomics

Wikinomics Book Review