Rules of the Hive Mind

Well, Wikipedia’s decision is pretty straight forward (http://tinyurl.com/ludanw). For all Web social network media that aim for a serious audience, the self-correcting mechanism requires not only critical amount of participation, but also check-and-balances to achieve the unique combination of benefits of

1. low cost content generation – by voluntary users

2. speedy correction

3. infinite subject matters

Beware, not everything goes. advocacy or propaganda and philosophical, ideological or religious dispute do not belong to serious Web social media. Though on issues of historical entries mong other types, philosophical and ideological disputes are hard to keep out if not impossible. But if 20th century philosophy taught us anything, we should know by now that there are only versions and iterations of the versions of facts and truth. What’s better than having an ongoing, evolving versions and iterations of “facts” and “truth” which are kept in multi-dimentional fashion – such as in Wikipedia’s edit history, editor’s profile, other metadata such as time of edit, notes about the edit, etc.

The use of free tagging and UGC within enterprises remains a open question.

Wikipedia Blocks Edits From Church of Scientology

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on May 29, 2009 – 11:19am.

Los Angeles – The committee in charge of user-edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia voted unanimously this week to block contributions to the site from IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology, after a lengthy arbitration determined that users were editing Wikipedia articles in the church’s interest. “You could imply that there is a conflict of interest,” Wikipedia spokesman Dan Rosenthal told ABC News. “Rather than two unrelated people getting together,” advocates of scientology have been “getting together, saying, ‘Let’s work together

to make this a more pro-scientology article.’”

Users associated with the church can apply for an exemption to the block, provided they first agree to abide by Wikipedia’s stated rules, which say that “use of the encyclopedia to advance personal agendas — such as advocacy or propaganda and philosophical, ideological or religious dispute — or to publish or promote original research is prohibited.”

In addition to blocking IP addresses connected with the church, Wikipedia also decided to block a number of anti-Scientology editors from changing articles related to the church.