Software certainly isn’t the only successful application of the open-source approach. One of the most interesting applications is Wikipedia. If you have not come across Wikipedia, stop reading this essay, open up a browser and go directly to www.wikipedia.org. Seriously. Go now!

Wikipedia is the most important information resource since the advent of Google. Arguably, it is even more useful than Google. Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia. It has articles on an enormous range of topics. Punch in Boeing, punch in special relativity, punch in Churchill or Monet . Wikipedia will have an article on it. The article will be short, concise and useful. In addition, the articles will have links to related topics. But be careful, if you are at all a curious person, you stuck there for hours.

Assuming you took my advice, welcome back.

How is Wikipedia an open-source effort? And how is it that Wikipedia represents the results of an emergent self-organizing system? And why “Wiki”?

Wiki Wiki means “really fast” in Hawaiian.

In a May 3, 2005 NY Times article, Paul Boutin compares Wikipedia to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The parallels between The Hitchhiker’s Guide (as found in Adams’ original BBC radio series and novels) and Wikipedia are so striking, it’s a wonder that the author’s rabid fans don’t think he invented time travel. Since its editor was perennially out to lunch, the Guide was amended “by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing.” This anonymous group effort ends up outselling Encyclopedia Galactica even though “it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.”

Adams actually launched his own online guide before he died in 2001, but it was, he wrote, “still a little like the fossil record in that it consists almost entirely of gaps.” Wikipedia is a colossal improvement—it’s just like the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide, only nerdier. Wikipedia is the Web fetishist’s ideal data structure: It’s free, it’s open-source, and it features a 4,000-word exegesis of Dune.

Unlike all other collaborative systems, Wikipedia is totally open. If you don’t like the article on Brownian motion, hit the edit link and change it. No one is going to edit your changes. They’ll be posted straight away. If you get it wrong, the next person who comes along will fix it. If you think that Wikipedia ought to have an article on Innovation Creators, go write one. The Wiki will ask you where to list it. If there isn’t an appropriate section, you can create a new one. But know that linear categories are not the only way that people find information in Wikipedia. They also use search and, because it is the web, they can also follow links from other pages. To give your article context, you can even write a few links to other related articles.

My wife and I went to Maui for our honeymoon. Sure it was a clichéd thing to do, but we loved it. As tourists, we were inevitably somewhat isolated from true Hawaiian culture. We did, however get a few glimpses. Aloha is more than just hello. It’s a way of life. I hope I am forgiven for my crude mainlander’s explanation here, but my understanding is that the concept of Aloha comes from a sense of how interconnected our lives are. For me, it was summed up in a bumper sticker we saw on the back of a little old beat-up yellow Datsun pick-up truck.

If you want to live Aloha, you got to give Aloha

Wikipedia relies on people living and giving Aloha. Wikipedia has all the required elements of for an emergent system. Wikipedia has been created by independent, self-motivated individuals. They randomly stumble upon the site through the results of Google searches, through New York Times articles, or after reading apparently unrelated things like this essay. They like what they see and they contribute because they want to live Aloha. My guess is that Steven Johnson (author of Emergence) would probably argue that Wikipedia is even closer to a truly emergent system in that absolutely no one tells people what to do.

Recently, Wikipedia has attracted attention for some of it’s errors. However, a study by the journal Nature has shown that Wikipedia is about as accurate as Britannica. Further, as I explained in a recent couple of articles, it is possible to further leverage the open source community to collectively grade the quality of Wikipedia articles, thus providing readers with all the information they need to know whether they can trust a given entry.

Wikipedia also has some of the elements of an environment that encourage innovation:

1. Each entry has a history of who edited it, so the contributors all know who is who
2. Contributors have a clear idea of what is going on. In the case of Wikipedia, the community’s strategic objective is to determine what information needs to be added to Wikipedia. Wherever people think that there needs to be a new article on a given topic, they leave a “stub” article requesting a contribution from someone who knows a little more about the topic.
3. There is some sense of ownership, though it isn’t that obvious. At the top of any article, there are four tabs. If you click on the one called history, you can see who has contributed to the article. Each contributor has their own small page on Wikipedia. Why do people contribute? Because their friends and colleagues who also contribute give them praise.
4. There is an environment of reciprocal altruism. The major contributors help each other out. With over 600,000 entries, the community powering Wikipedia is willing to give.
5. The environment has a feedback system. Get it wrong, and the next hitchhiker will change your entry. It’s important to note that the concept of feedback needs to be thought of at the system level, rather than direct feedback to a person. Wikipedia’s feedback system ensures a constantly evolving, and hopefully improving set of content.
6. The entire market is primed to expect constant innovation.

This last point is the key to what makes Wikipedia so powerful as a knowledge management system. Until software researcher, Ward Cunningham, invented the concept of a Wiki in 1995, all major knowledge management systems required that administrators begin by designing information taxonomies and content approval workflows.

From the get go, systems like Lotus Notes were designed to stop innovation because they prevented the majority of users from being able to create new taxonomies and new types of content creation workflows.

As an aside, it turns out that it wasn’t Lotus Notes itself that was the problem, it was the system admins. A comment from Richard Schwartz is worth checking out. Here’s part of what he says:

This is incorrect. From the get-go, Lotus Notes provided exactly those capabilities. (I’m talking about versions 2, 3, and 4. The current version is 7. Version 1 was used by only a handful of customers.) The Notes client program included all of the product’s database creation and application developemnt capabilities to every single user. It was

What happened is that the users, whether IT departments or otherwise, denied the permissions and the training the users needed to take advantage of those tools. Organizations didn’t want to empower users to create their own taxonomies and workflows because they thought it would lead to data chaos.

Innovation does not happen in an environment that was designed by people who think of innovation as a liner process with specific people required to play specific roles. Innovation is not something that can be shoved into the assembly line model. Instead, most innovation is the product of an emergent environment.

By the way, if you are interested in using a Wiki to drive innovation within your own organization, it might be worthwhile to look at SocialText