Revolution! ... Not.

I like to think that I can say everything I want to within two posts every week, but every once in a while I skip over a thing or two. For whatever reason, most of the stories I've passed over these dozen or so weeks have had to do with a rising number of wiki projects in areas that the wiki hasn't been used traditionally ("tradition" not being an extensive length of time here, but you know).

I've heard about several, but there have been two that really caught my eye. The first was an experiment by Penguin Group to write a novel in wiki format. It wasn't quite as open as other wikis, though I did hear about several incidents of wikipedia-esque sabotage. As of right now, there's no word on how the project turned out--there may be further rounds of editing--but overall Penguin's approach was a casual one, making clear from the first that the project was nothing more than an experiment. It was never definite if the result would ever be published.

One that raised my eyebrows a little higher, and a little more sustainedly, have been proposals to integrate "citizen journalism" into the (faltering) commercial journalism industry via wiki. The idea would be to collect data and source materials for news stories quickly, efficiently, and cheaply via a wiki that anyone can access. Most of these projects are still in developmental stages; to my knowledge, no major news organizations have adopted large-scale citizen journalism programs, so the place of such a system has yet to be determined.

Of course, that's true for wikis in general. The debate over wikipedia as a credible source continues, punctuated by criticism of journalists who cite it for fact checking, both from the inside (such as a memo that circulated at the New York Times a little while back instructing employees not to accept wikipedia as a source), and from the outside (such as criticism of Boston Globe journalists citing wikipedia in smaller-scale news weeklies like Boston's Weeky Dig).

But in particular, that debate is much more present when wiki communities revolve around fields like entertainment and journalism, in which subjectivity and objectivity are harder to define than other places. Its uses in other areas--citizen science is an example of a field in which amateur involvement is much more defined--have had an easier time figuring out where and how far to implement wikis and similar systems. Science is one of numerous fields in which this is just easier to figure out; trusting open communities to report bird sitings, but not to interpret the large bodies of data that arise from these reports, is a fairly straightforward judgment call to make.

We live in a slightly different world. It's easier to judge who can do what in scientific fields because certain functions simply cannot be done without adequate training. For us, however, the bestselling American novel of all time--Gone with the Wind--was written by an amateur who never planned to publish it except at the urging of others, and the journalistic story of the century was reported by an anonymous source--"Deep Throat"--who was not himself a journalist, working through established names at the Washington Post.

I still think we have something to learn from science, though. Regardless of how far they take citizen sources, they've figured out how to take them: with a grain of salt. This may be because fields like science and technology are confronted with innovation and new ways of doing things on a very regular basis, and people who work within those fields are less prone to overestimate the implications of new developments, but in any case they seem to have the idea.

So does Penguin. Nowhere along the line have they made any silly assertions about revolutionizing the novel or changing the industry, etc. The journalism people seem a little more over-enthused, but it's once again worth noting that the first place I read about this was--that's right--the New York Times, and I swear to dog, those people's grasp on reality is light enough to make those guys identifying themselves religiously as Jedi sound convincing.

As for the debate about Wikipedia, I'm not going to go claiming that it's rife with lies and misinformation, but the NYT at least has it right on this count: I wouldn't cite it when my reputation is on the line. Wikipedia is a great thing to have at our fingertips, but I greatly doubt that I or anyone else would pay to be able to use it, and anyone who suggests that it will replace commercial encyplopediae is kidding himself.

As people find more and more ways to use wikis, it's important to remember that they're not The New Way of Doing Things. They're just another method that may or may not be appropriate to any given situation.