<img alt="" height="1" width="1">Agencies Share Information By Taking a Page From Wikipedia
Washington Post, United States -34 minutes ago
By Stephen Barr When President Bush challenged Congress to cut the number and cost of earmarks by half, the administration's budget chiefs turned to their ...


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The headline is a tad misleading. The federal agencies set up a private wiki on their own servers. They adapted the concept of a wiki-based system; they didn't use Wikipedia itself.

Porkcruft.

So they used a wiki. Wikis aren't inherently bad, they're just a very horrible tool for building an encyclopedia.

Actually, the Wiki software for collaborative editing isn't inherently bad software.

But a collaborative enterprise needs a social contract among the participating collaborators to ensure that they maintain a collaborative climate rather than a competitive one.

Wikipedia's organizational mistake was to adopt and entrench a competitive culture rather than a collaborative one.

I think I'd disagree. They are a very good tool for building an encyclopedia, just a very bad tool for publishing one.

<img alt="" height="1" width="1">Agencies Share Information By Taking a Page From Wikipedia
Washington Post, United States -14 hours ago
By Stephen Barr When President Bush challenged Congress to cut the number and cost of earmarks by half, the administration's budget chiefs turned to their ...


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So much truth in such a small sentence.