David Terrar blogs atWikiConsulting.com

Way back in October, that month’s London Wiki Wednesday on 3rd October  was hosted by the innovation consultancy ?What If!, in their rather funky, stylish meeting space called the Old Laundry.  This has a great atmosphere, rather like Skype’s Chill Out Lounge at their London HQ, with comfortable sofas and bookshelves full of books and other interesting stuff - examples of mobile phones through the ages, the first Amstrad Notepad NC100 computer from the early 90s, or yellow plastic hair that rather suited Toby.  My thanks go to Anne-Fay Townsend, and the wiki-chick Julie Callick for being such great hosts, and laying on the pizzas, beer and wine. 

Shelli Baltman, ?What If!’s CEO, kicked off proceedings with an intro to the type of strategy and creative consultancy they do, and we have to give her special thanks for funding the event out of her marketing budget. 
Toby Moores and I then failed abysmally to Skype/Video connect London Wiki Wednesday with the first meeting of the Bay Area CreativeCoffee Club, which happened to be going on at exactly the same time in a coffee shop in Menlo Park, California.  Maybe next time.

Anne-Fay Townsend and Julie Callick spoke about ?What If!’s own use of wikis in all of their projects, explained how every employee gets their own wiki page, and is encouraged to contribute.  They also gave their thoughts on how social media can be used within corporations.
I went on to explain the rationale behind CCC.  It’s an OpenCoffee Club style meetup, aimed at getting the worlds of business and academia together to talk about creativity, make connections, and discuss how we can encourage our organisations, public or private, to make creativity part of their everyday processes. 
Gordon Joly spoke about some personal examples of the injustice of Wikipedia’s approach, where some topics are deleted by “the editors”, even though there is clearly a user community interested in contributing or discussing that subject.  He also highlighted some successes he has had, like adding a page on 70s soul and funk band Kokomo (which just happens to be one of my old favourites - re-release of their first two albums out this month).
Paul Youlten talked through his experience of creating the first wiki style Yellow Pages - yellowikis - and then how his “Saturday morning project” fell foul of copyright issues.  Yellowikis still exists, but not in the UK. 
David Wynn presented the World premiere of Itensil’s new workflow and wiki based product Minuteman.  This is a free service which uses a subset of the Itensil product to automate meeting actions.  In theory you should be able to copy in your minutes from Word or some other text editor, and the system will automatically create a workflow from the actions to help you manage the process.  However, a bit of finger trouble invoked the first rule of live demos - that they invariably go wrong.  Derek Miers then chipped in to explain a bit more about the reasoning behind Minuteman, and its typical web 2.0 business model - a free service that is useful, but which might prompt you to upgrade to the full Itensil licence for project management and other business process functionality.  Even though the demo went wrong, everyone seemed to like the concept and want test accounts, which should be available in a few weeks.  (Disclosure - David is part of D²C, and we are the UK partner for Itensil.)
Richard Drake talked about the history and development of the wiki.  He highlighted that Ward Cunningham was the real genius and commented on how disingenuous Jimmy Wales has been in talking about the development of the wiki and wikipedia with no mention of Ward.  On Wikipedia he commented that sometimes the neutral point of view was a bit of a shame,  and predicted that it’s glory will peak. 

We finished earlier than usual at 8:30 and then repaired to the local pub for more chat and networking.  Everyone I spoke to thought it was a good mix of people and topics, and another great success.  The next event was to be on November 7.  Stewart Townsend and Sun Microsystems were kindly providing the venue, but food, beer and wine.  For future events, as always if you can suggest someone, or if there are any volunteers, please contact me.

My Flickr photos from the event.

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Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, was due to come and speak at the last London Wiki Wednesday. Sadly he cried off at the last minute saying he was under the weather, but he sent Alison Wheeler and Sue Gardner to speak on his behalf, and they did a great job (my late report coming soon). However, while he was in London he made time to face some HARDtalk from Stephen Sackur on BBC News24. You’ve got 5 more days to follow the link and watch the 23 minute interview, which covers the kind of questions I’d hoped Jimmy would answer. Stephen wasn’t as vociferous as he can be in his questioning, or maybe it’s just the Jimmy is quite skilled at answering those questions accuracy and trust by now.

Jimmy tells us that after almost 7 years Wikipedia, which he intended to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge for every person on the planet in their own language, has pretty much achieved a lot of what he had in mind. However, he agrees there is a long way to go in many languages, and talks about focusing on India and Africa in particular. Sackur questioned him about the small number of contributors compared to the enormous readership, and Jimmy argued that there weren’t just hundreds, but 3-4,000 active contributors. Still not that many compared to the millions of readers.

When asked if Wikipedia’s entries are true, Jimmy’s answer of “mostly” made Sackur respond “that’s rather worrying“, but Jimmy defended the position explaining their aim on quality to be at least as good if not better than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and comparing their problem with the normal issues in mainstream journalism. Since Britannica has 60-70,000 articles, and Wikipedia has more than 10 times that, Sackur described what they are doing as absurdly ambitious, and quizzed him over the editorial approach on things like the George Bush entry, with its emphasis on Hurricane Katrina. He suggested that this went against the site’s stated objective of having a neutral point of view, and anyway that ambition is misleading as there is no such thing. Wales’ defence was to say that the ultimate arbiter is not himself, or a single editor, but the community of contributors. Every page has a discussion section, and so with discussion, collaboration, and further references, they can refine entries and get closer to the truth, and again compared the problem to journalism. They discussed the John Seigenthaler incident, where a false Wikipedia entry suggested he had been involved in Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination and had been on the site for 132 days before it was corrected. Jimmy explained the way this had slipped through, and that they’ve changed their processes so new contributors are disallowed from creating new articles from scratch. Stephen pressed him, citing an inaccuracy on his education in his own Wikipedia entry, or the way Jimmy had changed his biography over who founded Wikipedia. Jimmy wasn’t fazed and said their solution is to have as many eyes and as many people participating as possible, and recommend adding to the discussion page, explaining the perceived bias, and giving another source. There followed a discussion where they compared Wikipedia to a public toilet, where you are never sure of who has cleaned it before you got there, and that there were good toilets and bad - very wholesome!

Wales was also questioned about his commercial venture of Wikia. This is where the wiki concept has been applied to particular communities, like the World of Warcraft wiki. Wales is happy to segregate this from the non-profit Wikipedia site, and sees no issue in generating revenue from advertising, or doing a YouTube style revenue sharing approach with content providers for this other style of community.

Finally they touched on their search engine initiative, where Wales explained that this was partly political, and all about openness. With engines like Google you have no idea why a particular ranking has been awarded, and so having the code and algorithms open would mean everybody knows where they stand. All in all it was a good introduction to the guy’s thinking, for those of you that haven’t seen him speak before.

 

 

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