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Stephen Colbert punks Wikipedia

Comedian Stephen Colbert, who introduced the term "truthiness" into the collective vocabulary, pulls a stunt that demonstrates the perils of collaborative editing:

Stephen Colbert decided to take on Wikipedia tonight, and discuss his vision for a new "Wikiality," where the masses create the facts they want to believe in. And did they ever. At the conclusion of the amusing segment, Colbert instructs his audience to find the Wikipedia entry on elephants, and edit it to say that "the number of elephants has tripled in the last six months." Not surprisingly, plenty of people went to either make the edit, or to see if had been made.

Colbert's prank underscores the inherent risks in using collaborative environments for knowledge-sharing: accuracy can be easily subverted by authors intent on causing mischief. This is counterbalanced by the opportunity for multiple contributors to amplify a body of knowledge. It all comes down to the trustworhiness of the community providing that knowledge.

Update: According to Business 2.0, Wikipedia was quick to lock down the affected pages: "In this battle of truth vs. truthiness, truth ended up with the upper hand."

Wikis and knowledge sharing

Intelligent Enterprise has a nice introduction to wikis. What's a wiki? Read on:

A wiki is an online tool that allows users to update and publish content collaboratively. Anyone who has access can edit the content, using a very simple tool and an ordinary web browser. Wiki usage is known as ‘collaborative authoring’.

The first wiki was a complement to the Portland Pattern Repository, created on March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who based the name on the Hawaiian term “wiki wiki”, which means “quick.” And, the largest and most famous wiki is Wikipedia. This is a web-based encyclopedia based on free collaborative content. Founded in 2001, it already has more than 1.6 million articles. A more recent example of Wiki innovation is Wikicities, a collection of communities with websites that you can edit.

Within the corporate environment, wikis are proving to be valuable tools for:

• Project collaboration, information sharing and managing content
• Design collaboration
• Organizing a community around a written project
• Distributed intelligence gathering
• A knowledge base or collaborative extranet
• Fostering information flow within an organization
• Helping distributed teams work together seamlessly and productively
• Eliminating the one-webmaster syndrome of outdated intranet content 

The main features of Wikis are:

• A simple (and free) way to build and manage content
• Support hyperlinks and has simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly
• Accessibility from everywhere without any software installation (just a browser)
• Easy to track and constantly up-to-date

Organizations that have leveraged Wikis include Disney, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), Yahoo, IBM, Lufthansa , New York Times Digital and Motorola. For example, Disney Corporation uses wikis, integrated into a collaborative toolset along with internal blogs and RSS feeds, as part of an information sharing strategy aimed at facilitating internal discussion, and documentation.

Most of us have probably looked something up on Wikipedia at one time or another. But is anyone using wikis professionally or in corporate life? If so, how useful have they been and what has been your experience to date?

Why we don't share stuff, particularly knowledge

Dave Pollard has an interesting post on the cultural factors that impede us from sharing knowledge with one another. His list is fairly comprehensive and hard to dispute. It includes the observations that "bad news rarely travels upwards in organizations" and people "accept and internalize only the information that fits with their mental models and frames".

Not content to just catalog the impediments, he also offers a list of suggestions for counteracting these tendencies. Many of these will come across as conventional such as "flattening the organization (to make it more transparent, with fewer levels for news and information to navigate)" or "keeping information tools simple and intuitive" (both easier said than done). But that said, they're still worthwhile tactics.

Overall, Pollard's main point is that it is not technology that poses the main obstacle to effective sharing of knowledge - it's us. It's hard for people working in the trenches on a daily basis to give any thought to what they know about a particular topic and how it can be shared to enable their colleagues to work faster and be more productive. Sometimes, it's difficult to know where to start. But in our own calculations of "The Total Cost of Talent", knowledge - particularly knowledge loss within an organization - shows up as the single biggest contributing factor to driving up hidden costs. It's a powerful argument for spending the extra cycles on creating processes and spaces for knowledge sharing and retention.

Next version of Office to use XML as a standard

This just in:

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, said on Wednesday that it will make XML, a data format increasingly used by businesses, standard in the next version of its Office program due out next year.

XML, or extensible markup language, is used to transfer data back and forth between different programs, computers and organizations.

The upcoming Office upgrade -- code-named "Office 12" -- will have new default XML file formats for the Word wordprocessing, the Excel spreadsheet and Powerpoint presentations programs, Microsoft said...

The new default formats for Word, Excel and Powerpoint will change, respectively, from ."doc," ".xls" and ".ppt" to ".docx," ".xlsx" and ".pptx," Microsoft said.

This has huge implications, given the sheer volume of documents created with Office apps and the widespread acceptance of XML as the lingua franca of databases. It will be interesting to see the effects of this as we move down the road.