Wiki's and Legitimate Knowledge

Everybody's heard the hoopla about blogs and how they're such a revolutionary tool. You may not have heard of "Wiki's" which aren't quite as well-known as blogs yet, but have revolutionary potential of their own.

What's a Wiki? Here's the description from "Wikipedia,":

A Wiki or wiki (pronounced wǐkē, wēkē or vēkē) is a website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. "Wiki" also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website.

The aforementioned "Wikipedia" is a free, online encyclopedia and is probably the most famous Wiki. Basically, anyone can create an entry for a term and then others can edit it. This sounds chaotic, but some very interesting things happen when you have hundreds or thousands of people working on a Wiki. If someone writes something clearly inflammatory, biased or false, someone comes right behind them and changes it. So there's a built-in incentive to have facts to back up what you're writing and to phrase things in such a way that others will agree to them.

If you have a few minutes, watch Jon Udell's study of the entry in Wikipedia for "heavy metal umlaut." The link leads to a flash movie where Udell walks you through how the entry for "heavy metal umlaut" was built and evolved over time. It's pretty astonishing just for the fact that so many people are involved in the editing of the entry for something as obscure as "heavy metal umlaut," but Udell also points out how the Wiki participants establish and enforce Wiki norms.

The consequences for this are startling. Writing encyclopedias has always been the realm of experts, where "smart people" write "the truth" about any given subject. Now, however, anyone with access to the internet can participate in writing "the truth." Other Wiki's are springing up all over, including WikiNews.

The norms of discourse in Wiki's are also fascinating. For example, "deliberative democracy" is a big topic for democratic theorists and one of the big ideas in deliberative democracy is that we should establish institutions which encourage everyone to participate in deliberation and encourage each participant to empathize with the position of their adversaries and attempt to frame their arguments and conceive of their goals in ways that would be acceptable to their adversaries. Wiki's do all of these things!

Sound interesting? Check out the Wikipedia entry on Sociology or this attempt at creating a Wiki Introduction to Sociology. Don't agree with what you see? Change it! Think something's missing? Add it!