Wikis: spreading into new realms
Buoyed by the growth of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the wiki model of shared writing and editing is spreading into surprising new realms, from accounting, real estate and academic research to cake design and even intelligence gathering.
“Wikis are finally becoming mainstream,” said Newton technology pioneer Dan Bricklin, who plans to release WikiCalc, a next-generation spreadsheet that lets multiple users simultaneously log and update numbers via the Internet, by the end of November.
Jamaica Plain artists Ravi Jain and Sonia Targontsidis have started Wiki-Cake, which they called an online experiment in collective cake baking. “It’s kind of like picking out your wedding cake, only with a lot of people,” Targontsidis said.
A wiki — the word comes from a Hawaiian term for “rapidly” — is a type of computer software that allows people to create and change Web page content with their browsers, enabling the kind of open editing model employed by online communities like the five-year-old Wikipedia. Although new wiki projects have cropped up in recent years in technology labs and college dorms, the concept is now being adopted in business, education and government, often on the public Internet but sometimes behind firewalls restricting participation to employees or customers.
“It’s not just a tool, it’s a culture,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a former Harvard Law School professor who teaches Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University in England. “The idea that exactly one person has to hold the quill at any moment is an assembly line concept. The wiki concept is about parallel production. And under the right conditions, the results can be spectacular.”
Zillow.com, the Seattle Web site that pulls local property records to give instant estimates of home values across the country, installed a wiki tool in September enabling visitors to add information about their houses. MIT’s new Center for Collective Intelligence last month rolled out a wiki handbook inviting researchers to jointly post and edit their ideas about harnessing knowledge.
MIT’s Sloan School of Management is working with the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and British publisher Pearson on a business book written and edited by wiki. And the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have created the Intellipedia wiki to encourage analysts to post and share intelligence leads on a secure site.
One sign that the trend is reaching critical mass came when online search giant Google Inc. jumped into the wiki game last month, acquiring California startup JotSpot Inc., which develops collaboration tools letting Internet users create, modify and delete information. Google hopes to incorporate the wikis into its new suite of software services.
But some of the early wiki adopters have stumbled. Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia cobbled together by tens of thousands of contributors, claims to be more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica. But it had to deputize a cleanup crew to enforce quality standards, catch mistakes and restore stories altered by pranksters or partisans. (The same wiki technology that transforms Web sites into interactive bulletin boards allows them to be rolled back in time.) In one notorious incident, a saboteur falsely implicated a Nashville newspaper editor in the Kennedy assassinations.
Another wiki fiasco was last year’s Los Angeles Times introduction of “wikitorials,” inviting readers to rewrite the newspaper’s editorials online. The experiment was abandoned after three days when the Web site was swamped with obscenities and pornography.
Such problems haven’t deterred the new wiki entrepreneurs and enthusiasts, some of whom permit access to the technology only within their communities. Bricklin’s WikiCalc, for instance, could be used by accountants in various divisions of a company to enter, store and add data, or by coaches in a middle school basketball league to post scores, schedules and rosters. Users could decide whether to open the program to all or only to group members.
Excited by the potential of the technology to involve the masses in a shared creative experience, artists Jain and Targontsidis decided to invite strangers to come together online and make a cake. They announced the project on their video blog and brought a laptop to the opening of an “Art Cake” exhibition at Cambridge’s Axiom Gallery, a wireless Internet hot spot, where they asked visitors to vote for cake bases and fillings. A 10-year-old girl attending the event suggested adding orchids and chocolate-dipped raspberries to the cake-in-progress.
“We’re just really trying to embrace new media, and we’ve been fascinated with wikis the past few months,” Jain said.
The new wiki tool added to real estate site Zillow.com on Sept. 20 already has been used by about 200,000 homeowners. Most have been potential sellers trumpeting new kitchens or bathroom remodeling or challenging square footage figures culled from county records. “When you can utilize the collective intelligence of millions of people, that’s when the Web is the most useful,” said Amy Bohutinsky, a Zillow spokeswoman.
The Boston Globe