Colarado State Senator Chris Romer has started a wiki tap voters for ideas regarding congestion on Interstate 70. Romer's Google groups wiki has drawn a wide range of responses from "I Hate All of These Ideas, Want to Hit Senator Romer Over the Head with a Ski Pole" to a page about carpooling.

This kind of wiki is an interesting idea, but I wonder who exactly is contributing to this discussion. Considering the whitewashing that happens on Wikipedia, Romer will have to be careful regarding the assumptions he makes about contributors. It would be easy for an astroturf movement (one backed by corporate interests that would benefit from certain I-70 solutions) to begin to dominate this discussion. Wikis are great, but they're not inherently democratic. The anonymity of a wiki opens up the discussion (and, to me, this is a good thing), but it also means we have to view the text and authorship differently.

While browsing the Articles for deletion page at Wikipedia (um, for research purposes...I don't do it daily), I stumbled upon Debatepedia. Their mission:

Debatepedia has been developed as an interactive educational resource for people around the world, focusing particularly on the field of debate. It has a powerful mission to improve the the quality and depth of debates, reasoning, and deliberation in communities of all kinds. It also aims to reveal where powerful policy-makers, individuals, and interest groups stand on debates (position pages), and how legislation, ordinary people, and the world are affected by them, helping answer the question, "Why do we debate?". Within the debate community, Debatepedia aims to become a multidimensional resource for uncovering evidence, as well as a socially productive outlet for the extensive research done by debaters and their talented minds. In addition to these argument-building functions, Debatepedia is also a place for debate clubs and schools to identify themselves, their histories, and milestones, all in the interest of building and showcasing the international, multicultural, multilingual world of debating.

This video was posted over at Kairos, but I think I've seen it before. It does a great job of explaining wikis to beginners:

A colleague(John) sent me this story from Salon by Tim Wu about a website called Wikitravel.

Wu decided to visit Thailand with "only the internet" as his guide, but he ran into a problem when trying to use Wikitravel. It turns out that the site has a "be fair" rule that is similar to the Wikipedia "NPOV" rule. As Wu explains, this is not what you want in a travel guide. What you want are opinions: What's good? What's bad? Where should I stay? Where should I definitely NOT stay? He moved his internet research to Travelfish and had much better luck. This site is written by professionals but also allows user feedback.

The lesson? Wikis are not good for everything. While Travelfish seems to offer a good mix of professional writing, expert advice, and visitor input, Wikitravel (at least according to Wu) might be a case of Bad Idea Jeans.

There have been some recent stories about the government trying out the wiki model, the most interesting being Intelipedia - an attempt by the U.S. government at a collaborative spying resource. Now, the U.S. Patent system is getting in on the act.

The problems with such a system seem to be the same as with Wikipedia: reliability and security:

“The ability of a user to add content to a site is troublesome,” said Paul Henry, vice president of Secure Computing Corp. of San Jose, Calif. “In allowing everyone to add content, integrity goes right out the window.”

Hmmm. I guess it's probably obvious that I want to question this assumption. Yes, integrity changes, but "out the window" seems off to me. Considering the "integrity" of some of the information that currently flies into and out of our government (see Iraq War), I'm not sure a wiki-style resource would be anymore "troublesome."

Slashdot reports that one of Wikipedia's founders, Jimmy Wales, has set his sights set on magazine journalism. After acquiring the ArmchairGM sports community, Wales realized the power of fan culture:

“We learned a lot about enthusiastic fans and communities as we built ArmchairGM,” said Dan Lewis, co-founder of ArmchairGM and vice president of business development at Wikia. “Clearly sports are a topic that a lot of people care about, but there are thousands of others. Adding Entertainment, Local and Politics to the mix is just the first in a series of steps we will take to better enable people to come together online around common interests.”

Wikileaks is aiming to fill a void. As Mark Sweeney at Guardian Limited notes, Wikileaks is attempting to be a real fourth estate - a place that actually questions power. Here's a description from the site:

Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact; this means our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by non-technical people. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.

Since deciding to focus my dissertation on Wikipedia (a decision i continue to question every day), I am inundated with stories about Wikipedia. Friends send me links. This is great, but it is also overwhelming. Typically, these emails sit in my inbox for a day or two while I put off reading them...they scare me. Is that weird?

The problem is, I'm writing about a moving target. Now, I recognize that everyone, in some sense, is writing about a moving target - Shakespeare isn't sitting still. Nothing is. But it seems that Wikipedia is always in the news, and I think I'm going to have to keep track of this stuff here...on this blog...that I try to resurrect every sixth months or so.

So, here goes nuthin...