Last night at the Berkman Holiday Party — pretty much what you expect: dry sherry, fair trade cigars, male and female strippers with Ph.D.s — I apparently had SJ Klein’s idea. SJ is a dedicated Wikipedian (who, according to his Wikipedia entry, won 3rd place in the Cambridge area vegan cake stable height contest in 2002), and we were talking about the bruited idea that Wikipedia might brand particular revisions of an article as stable and reasonably reliable so that people could more easily link to a Wikipedia entry without having to worry that it will be different when readers follow the link.

So, I suggested that we don’t have to wait for Wikipedia to do this. Anyone could certify particular versions of particular articles as reliable. I could, you could, the American Association of Pediatrics could, because this doesn’t have to happen on the Wikipedia site. Dozens (hundreds?) of other sites already take Wikipedia’s content as their own, under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons GFDL license. So, why not encourage various authorities (personal or institutional) to create their own seals of Good Wiki Keeping, publishing a virtual slice through Wikipedia. So, for example, on the American Chemical Society’s site you could browse through the set of Wikipedia pages that the ACS has vetted; the seals of approval could be presented as authorized versions of Wikipedia – authorized not by Wikipedia but by anyone who wants to claim authority.

SJ has been thinking about this for a while. (That seems to be generally the case with him.) He wonders what happens to the pages to which the authenticated pages link, and he wonders what happens when someone tries to edit the authenticated page from within the authenticated site. Lots and lots of questions. But I think SJ has a good idea.

Not to mention that it would be a perfect example for my book about how knowledge is becoming miscellanized, and reclustered using different organizational principles. [Tags: wikipedia SJKlein EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

Categories: Uncategorized dw