Sharing a day with Jimmy Wales
Members of the Project Team for the Community Engagement Project recently attended a day which featured Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, as keynote speaker and a Panel Discussion and Workshop facilitated by Mark Pesce. The project team members, Mary Hannan and Janie McOmish, attended the day hosted by education.au hoping to increase their knowledge and understanding of the uses and benefits of wikis.
The Community Engagement Project wiki, established in 2006, is seen by the team as a valuable, user-friendly tool whose extended use will enable information to be disseminated and explored by the many and varied community participants in even more effective and efficient ways.
However, as happened with Wikipedia, the team believes they need to develop people’s belief and trust in this new medium. In the six years since it has been launched, Wikipedia has become the thirteenth most visited website in the world but its existence has raised questions as to how readers decipher fact from fiction when multiple users have the capacity to both create and edit content. Jimmy Wales believes everyone should be given free access to information. Intrinsically, this belief brings problems:
- How can one ensure that this information is neither biased nor incorrect?
- How can one ensure that all changes will be comprehensively tracked?
- How can users store earlier versions or return to information or ideas that have been previously entered?
Therefore, Wales and his team set about developing guidelines that would allow these potential difficulties to be overcome. In doing so they faced the same problem that face today’s educators:
- What are the implications for education in using an online culture?
- What opportunities exist to best develop and utilise collaborative learning in our global community?
- Who holds knowledge in the world today?
- What barriers may stop us sharing knowledge?
The protocols Wikipedia developed have led to the online encyclopedia becoming one of the most recognised wikis in the world; one which utilises “a culture of sharing and creativity which is not based on market exchange but rather intellectual exchange.” As Wales states, “communities are becoming aware of the knowledge latent within them.” He added that educators must continue to build on these concepts and let communities of learners manage themselves rather than educators taking on the role of an umpire.
These words reflect the environment that the project team is dealing with. Community engagement programs appear to be fertile ground for developments such as wikis but, just as Wales has had to encourage participants to feel “safe” when they contribute to the on-line encyclopedia, so community leaders need to feel safe when they contribute their content. Just as Elites revel in the concept that “knowledge is power”, participants need to be assured that their knowledge and integrity will be protected and that other special interest groups will not be able to shape existent knowledge to suit their own ends.
With all fledgling development, people need to pool information and one of the strategies Wales suggested to instil confidence in wary stakeholders was to encourage them to examine the progress and protocols that have been developed at Wikipedia.
It would seem that this, together with the team’s continual fostering of the use of the online environment, the Community Engagement Project wiki will become a valuable tool that will permit intelligence to be more widely distributed.
