July 23, 2007
A Working Knowledge of Wikipedia
HBS's research newsletter, Working Knowledge, has an article today about my experiences with Wikipedia's Articles for Deletion process around the "Enterprise 2.0" article, and the freely available online HBS case my colleague Karim Lakhani and I wrote about it.
Sean Silverthorne did a great job asking me and Karim the right questions, then making our responses sound coherent. In addition to asking us about the case study, he also questioned us about corporate use of the wiki technology. This discussion comes at the end of the article.
Take a look and tell us what you think. How big a danger, if at all, are adamant deletionists to Wikipedia? And what lessons should companies take away from this lesson, and from Wikipedia more broadly?
By the way, I notice that as of right now (4:05 pm EDT on July 23, 2007) Wikipedia has separate articles on "Enterprise 2.0" and "Enterprise Social Software." The last time I checked, this was not the case -- a search for "Enterprise 2.0" redirected the user to "Enterprise Social Software." I'm happy to see an Enterprise 2.0 article as part of WP. I don't know if the 'right' answer is to merge the two articles or do something else. All I know is, I'm staying out of this one...
