Susie is experimenting with her wiki over in Cambridge and there’s a wiki used by the regional champions and myself on pbwiki. Obviously we’re not the first people to discover the power of a wiki to collaboratively work on documents (no really we’re not!) but I do have a bit of thing for them – especially good to save on emailed versions of documents flying around t’internet.
To add to the party, there’s now a wikipedia entry for the ICT Hub. It has to stick within the wikipedia guidelines so its just the facts as you’d expect in an encyclopedia, but this did get me thinking that wikipedia can be used to publicise factual (and update-able) articles about third sector organisations. There was a “3rdsectorpedia” – but that seems to have closed – perhaps all our efforts should go into making wikipedia the authoritative place to look?
Filed under: ICT Hub, Web 2.0, collaboration, nptech, nptechuk
Hey Paul
You’re onto something here. The quality of most UK third-sector wiki entries is really quite low…
I saw the idea of ‘wiki barnstorming’ a while back (I can’t seem to find the link right now…) – which suggested getting a group of people together to blitz the creation of updated wikipedia entries over a short timespan (e.g. 48 hours) – taking advantage of the energy that time-limited challenges like the 31-days-to-a-better-blog, or Knowledge Jam sessions bring…
Perhaps we need some sort of challenge or week for improving 3rd sector wikipedia articles…
Thanks Tim !
Also searched and can’t find anything about ‘wiki barnstorming’. I do like the idea though and i’m sure the UK crowd that blog would be up to it. I will give it some thought … maybe pick out 25 wiki entries we want to get right or all do one for our own organisation…..
Ideas anyone ?
Hey Paul
Ah-ha, it was ‘Barn raising’ (hmm, not sure what barnstorming is… was that something to do with flying circuses? not sure I want to encourage people to barnstorm… bit of a mistake that – ho-hum)…
Anyway – I managed to find the link that alerted me to the idea:
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2006/01/23/barn-raising
and over here:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?BarnRaising
Remarkable how ideas occur independently isn’t it. Had an idea for a resource library, saw the name on a link on a webpage and though goodie someone has done it …blind link so I have resurected it.
Please feel free to create pages for any third sector organisation that you are connected to.
I suspect the reason no one has really done it before is there is too much for just one person and there are dozens of directories out there and no one fills them in. Still many hands make light work or raise barns!