It's a Wiki World

First IBM ruled the digital world. Then Microsoft took over. Not too much later, it was Google that made a huge splash. Now is it the Wiki Foundation's turn?

I’m sure that many, like me, have increasing turned to wikipedia for quick answers to what or who or how or where on a variety of topics. Each time I visit the site I’m blown away by the breadth of its capacity. Today I was doing a google search for a local Minneapolis radio station. And behold, one of the top suggestions led me to wikipedia. This ever-present expansive encyclopedia had multiple pages on this local (not-that-popular) radio station, describing its history, philosophy, and relation to the Twin Cities market. Is there anything that’s not included in this behemoth?

I’ve been running into this site with ever greater frequency of late. It touches on literally everything. And now I’ve been reading about how they plan to expand into numerous other endeavors: including a wiki-dictionary, a wiki-library, a wiki-university, wiki-quotes, wiki-news, and wiki-whatever else you can think of. And now they even plan on having a non-wiki type wiki-encyclopedia where only “experts” will have access to its content. I suppose this is in response to wiki gone wild feeling that many have.

I had breakfast last week with a group of guys from “the Porch.” A good number of the guys, as far as I could tell, were academicians. Sitting directly across from me was a professor at a local college. He was bantering back and forth with another gentleman about movies they have recently seen. As part of the attempts at humor they were pretending to be real sticklers about sources for their information. In response to one query, the professor across from me (with tongue planted firmly in cheek) blurted out that his authority on the matter was wikipedia. From the round of laughs I could sense the distain that probably exists around this website as a legitimate source for information (at least among some in this group).

Not sensing a similar backlash on most construction sites, I’ve been personally unaware of this possible prevailing attitude. But I’m sure the wiki people are in tune to it. And that’s probably why they’ve introduced something called “Citizendium,” which I just read about this afternoon. In an attempt to raise the bar of legitimacy I’m assuming that the wiki-meisters are looking at ways to still promote their open sourced philosophy while at the same time build in “safe guards” (and with it a higher reputation) for those looking for gravitas (how’s that for a throw back to the 2000 election and a fine example of a run-on sentence.)

So it seems as though wiki is mutating quite well these days and will soon take over a good chunk of our cyber lives. Then we will all know what we all need to know.

I’m even now starting to question why I didn’t drive around looking for a wiki-church this Sunday morning. I guess they still have their work cut out for them.