[Assam] HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't)
Chan Mahanta
cmahanta at charter.net
Tue Jul 24 00:48:27 PDT 2007
Thanks for sharing that Alpana. Wikipedia's vulnerability has been
well established by now. We saw it about Assam already, as was
evident in the 'adha- khunda' linguist's entries in regard to the
Assamese language.
At 12:58 AM -0500 7/24/07, Alpana B. Sarangapani wrote:
>Another side of wikipedia --
><http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/06/MNG5TG3K681.DTL&type=printable>http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/06/MNG5TG3K681.DTL&type=printable
>
>A better one?
><http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/citizendium.ars>http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/citizendium.ars
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>"In order to make spiritual progress you must be patient like a tree
>and humble like a blade of grass"
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>- Lakshmana
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>Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:36:06 -0700
>From: jaipurschool at yahoo.com
>To: dilipdeka at yahoo.com; assam at assamnet.org
>Subject: Re: [Assam] HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't)
>
>Dilip-da,
>
>Thanks for this info on wikipedia. I just became member and edited
>the page on Sandeep Pandey to include info from my meeting with him
>on Sunday July 22nd, 2007 and showed our AssamNet weblink of the
>post
>http://assamnet.org/pipermail/assam_assamnet.org/2007-July/013874.html
>as a reference - I hope it works.
>
>Check out:
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandeep_Pandey
>
>Umesh
>
>Dilip/Dil Deka <dilipdeka at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>The following is from the e newsletter HBS Working Knowledge. I was
>always curious about the inner workings of Wikipedia - how
>information in Wikipedia gets vetted. Using a particular case
>involving an HBS professor, this article provides good information
>on what I was inactively looking for. You also may find it useful.
>Dilip
>=============================================================
>HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't)
>Published: July 23, 2007 Author: Sean Silverthorne
>
>Executive Summary:
>
>For HBS professor Andrew McAfee, Wikipedia is a surprisingly
>high-quality product. But when his concept of "Enterprise 2.0"
>turned up on the online encyclopedia one day-and was recommended for
>deletion-McAfee and colleague Karim R. Lakhani knew they had the
>makings of an insightful case study on collaboration and governance
>in the digital world. Key concepts include:
>
>Despite thousands of participants, Wikipedia operates under a very
>ornate and well-defined structure of participation that enables them
>to produce a highly regarded online encyclopedia.
>A group of people in the Wikipedia world characterized as
>"exclusionists" could dampen user enthusiasm by increasing barriers
>to acceptance of Wikipedia articles.
>Knowledge-sharing technologies such as wikis are coming into
>increasing use in the corporate world, but companies must understand
>that a top-down approach to administering them will lead to certain
>extinction.
>
>
>About Faculty in this Article:
>
>Andrew McAfee is an associate professor in the Technology and
>Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School.
>
>About Faculty in this Article:
>
>Karim R. Lakhani is an assistant professor in the Technology and
>Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School.
>
><http://hbswk.hbs.edu/faculty/klakhani.html>More Working Knowledge
>from Karim R. Lakhani
><http://pine.hbs.edu/external/facPersonalShow.do?pid=240491>Karim R.
>Lakhani - Faculty Research Page
>E-mail Karim R. Lakhani: <mailto:klakhani at hbs.edu>klakhani at hbs.edu
>HBS professor Andy McAfee had his doubts about
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>Wikipedia, the online
>encyclopedia created and maintained by volunteers. "I just didn't
>think it could yield a good outcome or a good encyclopedia. But I
>started consulting it and reading the entries, and I said, 'This is
>amazing.' "
>So when the concept of "Enterprise 2.0"-a term coined by McAfee on
>the general idea of how Web 2.0 technologies can be used in
>business-popped up on Wikipedia, McAfee beamed. "I was bizarrely
>proud when my work rose to the level of inclusion in Wikipedia."
>Then, however, a turn of fortune took place. A "Wikipedian"
>nominated the article for deletion as unworthy of the encyclopedia's
>standards. McAfee thought, "It's not even good enough to get on
>Wikipedia?"
>He left the sidelines to join the online discussion about whether
>the article should be kept or jettisoned. It was also that moment
>that would eventually lead to an HBS case study, written with
>professor Karim R. Lakhani, on how Wikipedia governs itself and
>faces controversial challenges.
>
>The elbows are sharp on Wikipedia. It's not cuddly.
>-Andy McAfee
>
>The <http://courseware.hbs.edu/public/cases/wikipedia/>case offers
>students a chance to understand issues such as how online cultures
>are made and maintained, the power of self-policing organizations,
>the question of whether the service is drifting from its core
>principles, and whether a Wikipedia-like concept can work in a
>business setting. (See related story below.)
>
>The wisdom of crowds
>
>Even by online phenomenon standards, Wikipedia is huge. Begun in
>1999 by Jimmy Wales under the name Nupedia, the service today claims
>1.8 million articles in English, 4.8 million registered users, and
>1,200 volunteers who regularly edit Wikipedia articles.
>Anyone can submit or edit an article, which is why Wikipedia has
>been lampooned for high-profile inaccuracies, such as a biography of
>journalist John Seigenthaler Sr., who, according to the anonymous
>contributor, "was thought to have been directly involved in the
>Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby." Not so.
>A recent cartoon parodied, "Wikipedia: Celebrating 300 Years of
>American Independence!"
>But Wikipedia also employs a series of consensus driven vetting
>processes that strive to ensure the information is accurate, is
>verifiable, is built on solid sources, and excludes personal
>opinion. Just as anyone can submit an article, anyone can also start
>an "Article for Deletion" (AfD) review process if they believe the
>piece does not live up to those standards. After online debate about
>the worthiness of the piece, a Wikipedia administrator reviews the
>arguments and decides the fate of the article.
>
>The tension that they need to deal with is how to keep it as porous
>as possible.
>-Karim R. Lakhani
>
>The result has been a product that even academics regularly consult.
>In late 2005, the scientific journal Nature conducted a study
>comparing 42 science articles in Wikipedia with the online version
>of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The survey revealed that Encyclopaedia
>Britannica had 123 errors while Wikipedia had 162 (for averages of
>2.9 and 3.9 errors per article, respectively.) For the editors at
>Britannica, that may be a little too close for comfort.
>It's the kind of success that attracted McAfee, whose research
>centers on the use of technology in business, and Lakhani, an expert
>on distributed innovation.
>"We had these completely overlapping interests, and we were kicking
>around the idea of how we were going to write a case on Wikipedia,
>what research could we do: What's the right way in on this
>phenomenon?" McAfee recalls. "And we just got very lucky with
>timing, in that this article appeared about my Enterprise 2.0
>concept."
>
>Into the thicket
>
>In May 2006, someone unknown to McAfee, but who had read his seminal
>article "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration" in the
>MIT Sloan Management Review, posted a 34-word Wikipedia
>"stub"-essentially a brief starting point for others to build on the
>concept. McAfee's article detailed how so-called Web 2.0
>technologies such as blogs, wikis, and group messaging, employed in
>a business setting, could encourage more spontaneous,
>knowledge-based collaboration.
>Shortly after the posting, however, Wikipedia user "Artw"
>recommended the article for deletion, characterizing the entry as
>"Neologism of dubious utility." An administrator eventually deleted
>the work, but Enterprise 2.0 was resurrected as a lengthier piece.
>An AfD was again tagged on the article. The debate was on.
>"So we got to watch the governance process up close and personal on
>a topic that I cared a lot about," recalls McAfee. "I participated
>in the Article for Deletion process, and got to understand how
>Wikipedia works as a Wikipedian. At the end of all that we said,
>'Well, regardless of what else we do at Wikipedia, we've got a
>really, really good teaching case right here.' "
>
>Why Wikipedia works
>
>From the outside, Wikipedia may look like chaos barely contained.
>"When people look at these sorts of phenomenon at Wikipedia, they
>misread the anarchy," Lakhani says. "All these people, thousands of
>people, there must be no rules! But there is a very ornate and
>well-defined structure of participation. One of our big learnings
>was to actually dive into the structure: What is the structure that
>enables these guys to produce this great resource?"
>One element instilled by founder Wales is an ethic of
>self-governance and treating others with respect. In many online
>communities, personal insults fly freely, often fueled by youth and
>anonymity. Wikipedians, however, do not cotton to personal attacks.
>"The elbows are sharp on Wikipedia. It's not cuddly. But at the same
>time, I'm not entitled to call someone a bleep," says McAfee.
>Another reason the governance structure works, adds Lakhani, is that
>it is transparent-everyone's edits can be read and commented upon by
>anyone else.
>But the real basis of Wikipedia governance is a collection of
>policies and guidelines developed over the years that defines
>everything from article evaluation standards to the etiquette
>surrounding debate.
>"When I got involved in this Article-for-Deletion process, they kept
>citing chapter and verse the policies and guidelines to me," McAfee
>says. "It really showed me how much Wikipedians rely on these-they
>really are the foundations that Wikipedia uses.
>"So you've got a very clear set of criteria for telling your fellow
>Wikipedians, 'Here's my contribution, here's why it's valid and
>needs to be included,' " McAfee continues. "Now, you can argue about
>the wordsmithing and the structure of the article, but as far as the
>core question of what goes into an article, they've got that largely
>nailed."
>Or was it Enterprise 2.0 that was getting nailed by the rules?
>
>The endgame
>
>McAfee thought the Enterprise 2.0 article did, in fact, live up to
>those standards. So why was it being considered for deletion? As the
>arguments dragged on, McAfee began to feel that the debate might be
>about something more than just the article.
>"It seemed to me that some of the people arguing against it were
>entrenched, and they were using Wikipedia's policies as doors, as
>barriers, without being willing to engage in a real debate about
>them. So the policies had become for them a way to keep out articles
>they just personally didn't like."
>And although Lakhani believes part of the entrenchment was because a
>Harvard professor was in the middle of the fray-"I think what
>happened was that people took even firmer stances"-Lakhani agrees
>that rules seemed to be used in an exclusionary way. "Now the
>question is, is what we saw just a tempest in a teapot, or does it
>tell us something interesting? I think it does tell us something
>interesting."
>An ongoing tension within Wikipedia is characterized as the
>inclusionists versus the exclusionists. The inclusionists argue that
>one of Wikipedia's core values is that it should be open to all
>ideas, that truth emerges from a variety of directions. Better to
>include than exclude. The exclusionists see Wikipedia's
>utilitarianism diminished if too much froth clouds the valuable
>information inside.
>"There is always a tendency in communities or in any social
>organization to have this boundary and say in or out," Lakhani says.
>"This might be happening in isolated places inside Wikipedia. The
>tension that they need to deal with is how to keep it as porous as
>possible."
>Porous is good, says Lakhani, because most content on Wikipedia
>appears to originate at the fringes of the community from anonymous
>or infrequent contributors. (A central core of about 1,200
>volunteers refines the pieces over time and generally tends the
>Wikipedia garden.) If exclusionists began to make it more difficult
>for outside contributions to populate Wikipedia, the product's
>secret sauce could be spoiled.
>"That kind of ossification, if that happened, could be really
>dangerous," says McAfee. "But my feeling is this existential debate
>about the inclusionist versus the deletionist is not going to
>cripple Wikipedia. What's lost there, though, is that some people
>who have a lot of energy to bring-and I'm one of them-get turned off
>by these deletionists trying to slam doors in our faces."
>But in its 8-year life in several forms, Wikipedia has shown
>institutionally that it is open to evolution of the rules. "They
>continuously keep tweaking the rules as they encounter new
>situations," Lakhani says.
>
>Win some, lose some
>
>In the end a Wikipedia administrator, serving as judge, reviewed the
>17 pages of debate about deletion and decided Enterprise 2.0 should
>stay in. Victory was short lived.
>"After that," McAfee says, "one of the people on the other side of
>the debate took it upon himself to truncate the article greatly and
>change the title of it. And I left him a message. I wrote, "Hey, did
>you not see that the result was 'Keep'?" And he replied, 'Look,
>Wikipedia is this very freeform environment. This is what I feel
>like doing. If you don't like it, feel free to change it.' Which
>left me a little unsatisfied, I have to say."
>
>Q&A: Wikipedia in Pinstripes
>
>Companies interested in tapping into the shared expertise of their
>workers-the wisdom of crowds writ for business-are looking towards
>models such as Wikipedia that encourage collaboration.
>Can Wikipedia work in pinstripes? Harvard Business School professor
>Andy McAfee has his doubts that a corporate encyclopedia would have
>much value. But the underlying wiki technology-basically an
>electronic document and repository where participants can throw out
>ideas, comment on the work of others, and share documents-has more
>promise.
>McAfee and collaborator professor Karim R. Lakhani discuss their
>research into wikis and other collaboration tools for the enterprise.
>Sean Silverthorne: Is Wikipedia a good model that transfers to a
>corporate environment?
>Andy McAfee: No is the short answer here, simply because (a) how
>valuable is the corporate encyclopedia, and (b) how much enthusiasm
>or incentive do we have to contribute to the corporate encyclopedia?
>But an encyclopedia is only one of the things you can build with
>wiki technology.
>Karim Lakhani: Wiki is another experiment in how to generate more
>collaboration inside companies, but I've seen mixed results. It can
>be as simple as "We're having an office party, please sign up on a
>wiki page, and tell us what you're going to bring," to "We're going
>to run this project, bring in all your knowledge assets together,
>and then we can self-organize."
>What Wikipedia has shown is that self-selection is critical. Peer
>review is critical. So there is a challenge for firms that are used
>to managing employees and allocating the resources in a very
>top-down kind of way. Now we have a technology that enables
>self-selection, transparency, openness-how does a manager or
>management deal with the technology? Do they implement it in a way
>that's true to the spirit, or is it top-down? And, again, there are
>some very successful examples and some not so successful examples.
>McAfee: There are a couple of things that explain a lot of the not
>so successful ones. There is the fact that this is a different
>technology, and you have to be, at this point, kind of a technology
>enthusiast or an early adopter. There's another problem, though,
>which is when you think about the percentage of Wikipedia users who
>have contributed anything to Wikipedia, it's got to be way less than
>1 percent. Only a tiny, tiny fraction have done anything, but they
>have huge reach and huge impact. So the participation percentage is
>not big enough for this to spontaneously happen inside an
>organization. You've got to give it a push somehow. And management
>is my shorthand for where that push comes from. If you just say,
>"Employee base, here's a cool new technology, use it for your
>collaboration and coordination activities," you get back a big
>corporate blank stare.
>Silverthorne: Wikis rely on the foundation of free expression. But
>can employees feel free to express their opinions to everyone in the
>company as Wikipedians do in their world? The CEO might be reading
>it, after all.
>McAfee: You have to create an organization where you feel free to
>share your thoughts, and you don't care that your boss and the CEO
>can see it. And that's a much bigger challenge, I think. But then
>the benefits go up dramatically.
>Silverthorne: Have you used wikis yourself?
>McAfee: I can give you a couple of examples because I try to use
>wikis in a fair amount of my own work. I was organizing a 40-person
>conference of academics and needed to take care of all these
>administrative tasks that I really hate doing, like putting the
>schedule together. And I thought, "Ding, I'm going to outsource this
>to the people who are coming to the conference." So I put up a
>couple of initial wiki pages and e-mailed them to everyone. I said,
>"Here is the bare -bones schedule. You guys tell each other and tell
>all of us what you think we should do in each of these slots, and if
>you want to present in one of these 4 daily slots, just add your
>name to the list." And with very little pushback, the Web site for
>the conference self-assembled, and most people were quite happy with
>it. The amount of overhead went through the floor.
>I also use them in my MBA course Managing in the Information Age. I
>tell my students that about half their grade will be based on wiki
>contributions. So I solve the incentive problem that way. And then I
>have to deal with all the problems of, "Well, what do you want us to
>do?" ("I'm not telling you.")
>Lakhani: I think the other thing is that many companies are
>realizing that there's lots of knowledge in the outside world and
>are asking, "How do we enable the outside world to interact with
>us?" Many are thinking through wiki-like technologies that enable
>them to collaborate with outsiders and enable customers to give
>input.
>Silverthorne: Will your students be using these tools and concepts
>when they leave HBS?
>McAfee: I find it really hard to believe that all of my students are
>going to go out into the corporate world and never think about this
>category of tool. I don't buy it. When they get to their jobs,
>they're going to have collaboration, coordination, and knowledge
>-sharing challenges. Are they just going to send e-mails to each
>other? Darn, I hope not.
>Lakhani: The new generation of students, the MySpace and Facebook
>generation, will be hitting the HBS campus soon; they are already
>here to some degree. They are so used to collaboration and sharing
>in a distributed fashion, for instance, going to a friend's page and
>leaving a note. They have these asynchronous ways of coordinating
>and collaborating.
>McAfee: The distinction I draw is between channel technologies like
>e-mail and platform technologies that are universally visible and
>transparent and open to everybody. I think the communication bias of
>young people today has migrated from channel to platform.
>Lakhani: They look at e-mail as being antiquated. And so I think
>that's eventually going to hit corporations.
>Silverthorne: Are companies equipped to design these kinds of products?
>McAfee: One of the things you learn is that designing a good user
>interface is really hard work. I know that companies like Google and
>Facebook have spent person-years just getting it to the point where
>it feels very intuitive and easy for us to use. It wasn't easy to
>get there. One of the things I worry about is that companies will
>go, "OK, we need an internal Facebook. Why don't we put a
>three-person coding team together, and we'll throw one of these
>things up there?" And it's just going to be an inferior product, and
>employees are going to vote with their feet.
>Silverthorne: If you were to counsel companies that need more
>cross-collaboration and need to break down silos, what technologies
>would you recommend?
>Lakhani: I would say technology's not the answer. It's the
>information and the flows of the information you've architected and
>the rules around flow of information that matter. If you look at
>open-source communities and what they're beginning to accomplish,
>they did that with some very rudimentary technology-e-mail lists and
>simple source code repositories. But the outcome has been incredible
>and is based on the architecture and rules of participation. If you
>bolt on wikis to an old set of rules, it would collapse and die.
>McAfee: I'd say it a little bit differently. Wikis are about 10
>years old, but there are modern wikis that are kind of
>corporate-ready-these are recent technologies. Tagging systems and a
>lot of other things are recently available technologies. But I agree
>that the technology toolkit is basically in place; that's a
>necessary condition, but it's completely insufficient alone. What I
>usually tell companies is, "Look, if you want to activate this Web
>2.0-style energy inside your company, management is going to make
>all the difference. And if you manage it the old-fashioned way, or
>if you don't manage it and you just have the
>if-we-build-it-they-will-come philosophy, you're probably going to
>be disappointed."
>You need to be actively involved-I'm going to fall back on
>buzzwords-in coaching to get desired behaviors and leading by
>example, and not shooting people when they step a little bit out of
>line. The organization is going to be watching what happens, and
>you're going to send very, very strong signals one way or another
>that are going to be picked up very quickly.
>_______________________________________________
>assam mailing list
>assam at assamnet.org
>http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
>
>
>
>
>Umesh Sharma
>
>Washington D.C.
>
>1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
>
>Ed.M. - International Education Policy
>Harvard Graduate School of Education,
>Harvard University,
>Class of 2005
>
>http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
>
>http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
>
>
>
>
>www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
>
>
>
>
>http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
>
>
>Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail -
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