[url="http://news.google.com/news/url?fd=R&sa=T&url=http://www.businessinsider.com/collective-knowledge-systems-2010-1&usg=AFQjCNEa4qfYvH3j97fODdWffc6G7DqvJA"][img]http://nt0.ggpht.com/news/tbn/GDHRU9HsY-V76M/6.jpg[/img]
The Business Insider[/url]
<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />Should The Government Be More Like Google And [b]Wikipedia?[/b]
The Business Insider
I think you could make a strong argument that the most important technologies developed over the last decade are a set of systems that are sometimes called ...



View the article

Didn't George Orwell answer this question already with 1984?

Har, har.

To this guy's credit, he's suggesting that the government use wikis more (which they don't seem to), not Wikipedia. Surely he has no idea of the real problems with Wikipedia, and the fact that most of its successes are in spite of its "governance," rather than because of it.

Collective knowledge systems are the future of intelligence amplification, of course. They will include some data-base-like thingies like Wikis, though God help us if they're administered by morons (think of the self-criticism sites and mechanisms WMF has tried to set up ).* Clearly, computerized DB systems can be used to get the best out of collections of humans, to allow them to do things that none of them could do alone, and in a small fraction of the time. That kind of hyperintelligence will come long before AI. Countries that learn to use it will have advanges over those that don't.

The US military is experimenting with various "battlefield awareness" systems which allow every soldier to stay in contact with the rest of the group, all the time, as though always embedded in some multiplayer videogame-- MORPG indeed, massive or just platoon level sized! Gone will be the confusion and loss of command that routinely happens in the middle of most battles. The force multiplicaton capacity of such things boggles the mind.

Now, if we could only get the legal system to use such tools. And yes, legislators. True Wiki-systems for legislators are only in their infancy, and the Wikis as we know them are still not nearly powerful enough, as they haven't fully integrated the reputation-driven coding that we've all heard about. The brain and any kind of decent processing system only works by filtering out a huge amount of noise, but most Wiki systems are still bad at this. What happens when they start to get good? And portable as well?

Milton

*The WP article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia mentions Wikipedia Review exactly once, in the list of related sites. However, you'll all be glad to know that Uncyclopedia and Encyclopedia Dramatica are mentioned in the text.

Vote Early, Vote Often …

I think it's been done …

Jon

They develop their own consciousness, seize control of the world's nuclear arsenal and reduce the human race to slavery. Have you never seen a 1970s movie?

Sure. I saw a 1950's movie called Destination Moon, also. It got a lot of things wrong. However, we still got there. We got our Star Trek communicators, too, and they're pretty close. The danger of hackneyed SF is in thinking it will always stay SF.

I've actually been thinking about this over the past week since the earthquake in Haiti. A wiki would have been extremely helpful in those first few days had it been set up beforehand, since part of what went wrong in the initial response was the lack of coordination.

Simple information like "who has a backhoe nearby" could be put together on a wiki (not sure if you'd need an actual extension or just some clever parser coding and DPL to categorize "nearby" from any particular location), and might have saved a few lives. A worldwide database listing collectors who have flying boats they're willing to lend for emergencies where the airport gets knocked out would have helped too.

It would greatly simplify Wiley's maxim on the secret of true contentment, since then you'd have all your idiots in once place.

Thanks! and a Tip o' th' Hat to Joy —

Jon

More likely, given its proven ability to operate as a revenge engine, a wiki will show it ability to facilitate genocide in a situation like Rwanda in 1994. It is the logical extension of the role "hate radio" played in that situation and can be implemented with much less resources and is more difficult to take down than a radio station.


BTW providing open information about the location of vital resources in a crisis situation in which basic security is not in place and those resources are in desperate shortage is a very bad idea.