{"id":10,"date":"2007-09-15T15:39:05","date_gmt":"2007-09-15T14:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67bricks.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/15\/why-wikipedia-is-a-bad-example-of-knowledge-management\/"},"modified":"2021-12-16T11:01:14","modified_gmt":"2021-12-16T11:01:14","slug":"why-wikipedia-is-a-bad-example-of-knowledge-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/?p=10","title":{"rendered":"Why Wikipedia is a bad example of knowledge management"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nowadays, most peoples first contact with a wiki is through Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great resource, but I think it’s a bad example of using a wiki for knowledge management. The limitation of Wikipedia is that it aims to be purely a repository of existing knowledge. Wikipedia policies require that content on the site is written from a neutral point of view<\/a>, is verifiable<\/a> and contains no original research<\/a>: even going so far as to ban synthesis of other sources<\/a>. Although reasonable in an encyclopaedia, these restrictions give the wrong idea about how wikis can be used for knowledge management. They encourage the idea that wikis are for knowledge capture<\/strong>, rather than knowledge creation, and that their main purpose is to produce a good knowledge store.<\/p>\n

This bias extends to commercial wiki vendors, too. Wiki vendor MindTouch describes their wiki as making “knowledge easier to capture, find and consume” (thanks to Zoli’s Blog<\/a> for the link), and Atlassian describe their wiki Confluence as “lowering the barriers to knowledge capture<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

However, there are other wikis than Wikipedia, and the original Wiki was designed for knowledge creation<\/strong>. The Portland Pattern Repository<\/a> (also called the WikiWiki, or Ward’s Wiki) was the first Wiki, created by Ward Cunningham in 1995. Although technically simple, the Wiki’s brilliance was in its design: It facilitated asynchronous conversations between distributed contributors, enabling a dialogue across time and space. At its best, these conversations led to new insights, that were then formalised into documents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The WikiWiki was originally focused around design patterns<\/a>, but by the time I first encountered it in 1997, it was starting to be focussed around Extreme Programming<\/a>, and since then has drifted into other topics without a clear focus. Some of the most interesting pages on it are the longest established ones: I particularly like the patterns pages<\/a>, and the proto patterns<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At 67 Bricks, we’re using Semantic MediaWiki<\/a> to help us create new knowledge, as well as to store our existing knowledge. I’ll write more about it in a future blog entry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nowadays, most peoples first contact with a wiki is through Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great resource, but I think it’s a bad example of using a wiki for knowledge management. The limitation of Wikipedia is that it aims to be purely a repository of existing knowledge. Wikipedia policies require that content on the site is … Continue reading “Why Wikipedia is a bad example of knowledge management”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}