"New information" resources are all the rage on the web and the once obscure "Wiki" has officially achived noun status in the tech-savvy vernacular. However, Joshua Greenbam of enterprise Applications Consulting writing at IntelligentEnterprise.com says to watch your step, as the emerging world of wikis meshes not at all well corporate America:

I hate to be the one to throw cold water on the latest cool thing, but wikis and blogs — and all the other unwashed, untethered, so-called "new information" sources proliferating across the enterprise — are, all too often, just a lot of bunk masquerading as information...

...For now, the effect is largely limited to the comic and the pitiful. I must get an e-mail message a day about some ridiculous piece of news, scandal or business opportunity that is either too absurd, too lucrative or just too stupid to be true. What's sad is how big the CC list is on the e-mail that delivers the latest in Internet silliness to my desk.

The many problems with these new information sources didn't trouble the enterprise as long as blogs and wikis lived outside the mainstream of the corporate world. But, with mainstream business use on the rise, it's time someone took aim at the problems of proliferating information that exists outside an expert-driven system of checks and balances...

...The integrity of all information — corporate or private — rests on the ability of users to judge the validity of the source. So heaven help us if no one calls the bloggers and wikites on the carpet when they mislead and misinform; degrading information on the Internet will globalize ignorance to an incredible degree. And the last thing anyone needs these days is more global stupidity. We have enough politicians contributing to that problem already...

The flaw in Greenbaum's arugment seems to be the perpetuation of and extrapolation from misinformation - the idea that initially unchecked errors ripple outward corrupting an entire system. With the web's capacity of easy reproducibility and link-throughs these sorts of errors can proliferate as rappidly as transposed numbers on a spreadsheet can throw off calculations. The difference then, and this would seem to be in wiki's favor, is that human review and revision of wiki-data is constant and ongoing process. This is what separates wiki's from one-off websites - their facility for rapid peer review. It is a process that also separates wiki-data from that managed, maintained and dispersed by its more traditional counterparts.

The issue for corporations and individuals would then seem to boil down primarily to control. Any business wants to dictate as much as possible the presentation of its public profile and professional reputations. Wikis, in their nature are easy to produce and reproduce, making them very difficult to control from a central point. This is a valid concern for companies and reason enough for them to be wiki-wary.

While I can't entirely agree with Greenbaum's comparison of junk mail and reader-edited wiki content, his ultimate point seems a vaild one. Trust but verify. Check your work at every step. Take precaution on your own behalf, on behalf of your company and in the case of a company like Caveat Research, on behalf of your client as well, to review alternate sources of data for comparison purposes. Truth to tell, even "legitimate" sources of information are often complied in lowest common denominator fashion. Whether the editorial process is traditional or wiki-style, the axiom of "garbage in, garbage out" remains entirely true.

More from Greenbaum's article here.

-- MDT