Links: Value of Wikis, Looking At Social Media Ecologies

Sep 23, 2006

Value of Wikis – from a great new blog called Bent Rules that I just found via the comments on the recent TechCrunch post about Socialtext 2.0. Aaron Wright has some great insight on how the wiki satisifies an information need better than other tools, as evidenced by this excerpt from this post: “Think about it. What will better serve the interests of a niche community, let’s say interested in botany, a magazine (or encyclopedia) that only releases 12 issues per year (updated at most once a year) and a limited amount of static information. Or, an information community which not only has encyclopedic information but also other articles on a given topic that can range from the common “How to?” to people expressing a passion for various aspects of botany.”
Smart Mobs has a great post called Looking At Social Media Ecologies which examines the role of creators and synthesizers in constructing knowledge. Howard Rhiengold suggests that creators are often “ousiders” in a project like Wikipedia because they aren’t involved in the management of the site itself, but their contributions account for most of the information added to the wiki. Synthesizers, hs says, are people deeply involved with the project who use their knowledge of its overall structure to help assimilate the contributed information.