Live and visible event tweeting

I've just commented on a KIN bloggin' post on event tweeting which made reference to a post by Russell Davies about experimenting with live twitter feed accompaniments:

My initial thought is that it could be interesting, but then, after looking at the Russell Davies post, two things occurred to me:

1) Only about 5 people usually tweet at an event which means that seeing the same 5 people's comment come up all the time would feel more like having 5 hecklers than contemporaneous chat.

2) My gut feeling is that it has the potential to pander to an attention deficient population that cannot keep focus on a speaker who has put time and effort into engaging people. The idea of having a twitter feed alongside watching a film in Russell Davies' example appalls me.

Let's not forget what event twittering does best:

Allows simultaneous comment and discussion during natural breaks and then a continuation of that discussion.

Opinionpedia?

Why, oh why, oh why?

Two recent pieces have inspired to me start a blog. (Mainly to stop my rants boring everyone to death at work). Nothing to do with anyone seeing it as that won't happen anyway.

The first piece was an article in the videogame magazine (or videogame culture magazine as they prefer to call it) EDGE (issue 199, March 2009, pages 74-79) entitled 'Lost in transition'.

The article raises the question of how we preserve contemporary videogame culture. Do a google for 'video games' now and you will find about 460 million results. Video games culture is huge and the amount of digital content is astounding. Who is responsible for capturing this present before it turns into the long forgotten past and do we actually want to? This isn't a question limited to videogames by any means. The real reason that I reference this article is because it looks at wikipedia's suitability for capturing video gaming's history. Even more specifically the ongoing battle for MUD.

Wikipedia and MUD (MUD info sourced from EDGE)

Multi-User Dungeon games (MUDs) were the fore-runner to the MMOs that are taking over the virtual (and real) worlds like World of Warcraft and Eve. The importance of MUDs to the online gaming landscape that we see today has never been in doubt. So why has the wikipedia entry for the Threshold MUD game been deleted and re-started spawning a virtual battle for it's survival? The reason (and now we're getting the core of this issue) is validation.

The Threshold entry didn't meet wikipedia's valid sources requirement. According to wikipedia 'reliable sources are credible published materials with a reliable publication process'. Reliable sources exclude self publication. Ignoring the ambiguity of that definition it got me thinking about how we define reliable, how we decide that something is valid and is indeed knowledge, and not opinion.

The key issue to recognise here is that, in businesses, the vast majority of the true know-how of the business cannot be validated by external sources and hence cannot exist in wikipedia's view of the world.

I therefore suggest that the wikipedia model cannot work within businesses.

Wikipedia and mud slinging

The 2nd article was a BBC news (in the loosest sense of the word) story about the Tories altering a wikipedia article after a typically adult argument during prime minister's questions. I won't re-tell the story here as it's worth a read and will make you sigh at the least, maybe even chuckle.

The thing that I really took from this was not, once again, the battle of power over the accuracy of Titian's age but the fact that wikipedia has now reached the level of regard that it is taken as cold hard fact. An esteemed colleague of mine today suggested that whenever anyone says that they 'looked it up on wikipedia' there is a common understanding that this means that it should be taken with a pinch of salt and nearly always gets a smile or laugh response. Is there a shift in that perception or has it already happened? Is wikipedia content being taken without the pinch of salt?

So you think wikipedia is rubbish and businesses can't get wikis to work so they should stop trying?

No, I actually believe that wiki technology can be incredibly powerful in business. There is one big but. It is big but, I promise, as it starts to question the whole wiki ethos. Both of the above pieces have helped validate that 'but' in my mind.

Wiki content has to be owned. Someone, somewhere has to be responsible for every word, every picture and every single thing that exists in that space. Every piece of 'knowledge' that exists in that medium has to have a stamp of authority on it. 'We, the company, believe this information to be true and accurate to the best of our knowledge and can be used by the business' (or something to that effect).

Wikipedia is not a collaborative view of the truth, it's a collaborative space of validated truths

Wikipedia content is owned, most people just don't realise it. It's owned in the validation. It's owned by 'the credible published materials' that validate it's existence. It's owned by the individual who edited that published material. It's owned by those that wrote that published material. All the contributors are doing is re-mixing this validated work in a collaborative space.

Wikis in business are no different. I truly believe that for wikis to be useful within businesses they have to have assigned 'editors' (Credit to Nick Milton for the editors label, stolen with pride). In lew of 'credible published materials' these 'editors' must control what's in their space and ensure that the content is the correct content to be using, legally, ethically and morally. They must provide the validity.

Of course, this leads to a huge number of questions such as, "is it even collaborative anymore when my input will just be deleted by an authority who doesn't agree?", "How do you pick editors and how do you manage new, emergent areas?" and "Does this mean we have to set a taxonomy before we even start?"

But those questions are for another blog...