On David Wiley's blog we find the following intriguing statement: “Imagine the value OLS (Open Learning Support) could add to MIT/OCW if OCW were a wiki?”. David imaginings were stimulated by Chris Wagner's posting entitled the Impending Demise of Slashdot. As a contrast to the article plus threaded comment model commonly found in blogs. Chris Wagner makes powerful advocacy for adopting a wiki model.
“The Wikipedia model (the 'wiki way') is superior for knowledge management based on large-scale, persistent conversation.”
“With a large number of contributions, however, value might be better applied through content aggregation, integration, and editing. In that way, comments would add more to quality than to quantity.”
“… the focus on the new (articles) and the simple threaded appending of comments to articles leads to a long, but not well integrated knowledge asset, whose individual knowledge nuggets (story + comments) are poorly maintained.”
“… asset value for readers is almost exclusively determined by its new content, not the (quickly dated) archives … lives on the value of its present content, deriving too little value from its archived content.”
Chris goes on to contrast this with the Wiki model using Wikipedia as an example, e.g.
“… articles had more writing activity (by number of edits) in later life, accounting for 65% of content. Thus, quantity was more important earlier, replaced by a focus on quality later.”
Chris' has a point. His advocacy of the archive as the primary asset replete with embedded knowledge nuggets is important. To me he paints a picture where in the story + comment model these nascent knowledge nuggets seem to be travelling along a conveyor belt and unless you're paying attention at the time they fall off the end of the belt and get lost, to be replaced with new candidates which then vie for our attention.
The high level of contribution on Slashdot is fairly unique. For most of us, however, knowledge nuggets in the form of article + comments is at a more modest level. But I agree with Chris, we can easily focus only on the new article and commentary when the real assets lie in the archive. But those of us working in higher education know that the real gems lie in the archive. It's for this reason that wherever possible when we write an Auricle article we at least try to always reference related Auricle articles. Having said this I suppose a wikified Auricle could be composed of a never finished and constantly updated series of inter-related online documents.
A major concern, however, as someone who is plagued by the comment spammer pestilence in Auricle, I shudder to think what this plague could do to the quality of knowledge assets if they found, or were given, access, to a wiki.
Nevertheless, Chris Wanger's article and David Wiley's comment make for a good read and offer plenty of food for thought.
