4.0 (Wikis)

Richardson quotes Steve Jobs in his chapter on wikis in the discussion of the reliability of Wikipedia as a resource (pp. 59-60), saying that Jobs called it one of the most accurate encyclopedias in the world. (His tinyurl link to the Wikiquote page of quotes from Jobs no longer includes that particular reference: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs, although the page has lots of other gems which would be easy to be distracted by. One of my favorites: "'Real artists ship.' An old saying at Apple Computer, attributed to Steve Jobs, meaning that it is important to actually deliver."

Richardson goes on to say that using Wikipedia as a resource ultimately "takes a faith that collectively we can produce information that is as high quality as what a few trusted produced in the past." He wrote that at least three years ago... I find that I sometimes prefer crowd-sourced nonfiction materials as being more recently updated by a more diverse group. In an early post I referred to Stack Overflow, Metafilter or Quora as information sources I'm exploring. A recent ACRL article by David Lewis, Dean of the Indiana University - Purdue University Indiapolis Library, spoke to the "Inevitability of Open Access". The material is shared with a CC BY-NC license, and here's the abstract [the full-text .pdf is also available through that link]:

Open access (OA) is an alternative business model for the publication of scholarly journals. It makes articles freely available to readers on the Internet and covers the costs associated with publication through means other than subscriptions. This article argues that Gold OA, where all of the articles of a journal are available at the time of publication, is a disruptive innovation as defined by business theorist Clayton Christensen. Using methods described by Christensen, we can predict the growth of Gold OA. This analysis suggests that Gold OA could account for 50 percent of the scholarly journal articles sometime between 2017 and 2021, and 90 percent of articles as soon as 2020 and more conservatively by 2025.

This refers to open access to scholarly content as opposed to crowd-sourced content as facilitated by wikis (for example) -- peer-reviewed material by scholars who may share rights using models like those offered with Creative Commons licenses. I've noticed aspects of the scientific community talking about speeding up the process of discovery and breakthrough by opening their work earlier to more people, in a way not only reminiscent of the craving for speed reflected in Ward Cunningham's choice of the word wiki in 1995 (p. 55), but literally paralleling early wiki development such as that of Wikipedia itself. I took a quick side-trip to see if I could find the Twitter accounts for one of these scientists, but that's going to take a little longer to research. Once I find a few I'll add them to my link list.