Read this quote and think about which industry is being admonished:
“We cannot, however, continue to reject Wikipedia because we aren’t comfortable with the wiki process itself… To be quite frank, continually bad-mouthing Wikipedia to the very people who use it—successfully—makes us look a bit daft. It would be much more productive to teach [people] how to best use Wikipedia.”
I excised “colleagues, students, and parents” from the quote since I think you could swap in “patients,” “customers,” or “voters” just as easily.
Read the whole column by Chris Harris in the School Library Journal for more on how Wikipedia actually resembles the early days of the Oxford English Dictionary.
I couldn’t agree more.
Everyone believes the wiki idea has potential, it’s just that the actual implementation of vis-a-vis Wikipedia is not ideal for all purposes or all content. It never was meant to be.
The wiki technology, however, can be molded into many, many different methods for publishing information. Wikipedia is the start of that revolution in publishing.