Seminar: Challenging How Knowledge is Created with Jimmy Wales
Perth, Australia, 24 April 2007

This day-long seminar organised by education.au gave participants an overview of the current state of evolution of web 2.0 technologies, with the accent, naturally enough, on wikis. The programme consisted of a presentation by and discussion session with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, following which Mark Pesce introduced and facilitated a panel discussion. The day closed with a workshop involving all participants.

Major themes of the day included the fact that peer-produced networks are beginning to create a seismic shift in the nature of knowledge production and access; that authority is becoming increasingly decentralised and distributed; and that this represents a major challenge to the way things have been done until now, not just in education but in all areas of life. But perhaps the most important theme to emerge from all the discussions was that what matters is not so much technological change, but rather cultural change. On the one hand, some cultural change is necessary to allow new technologies like wikis to be fully exploited; on the other, the new structures of knowledge and authority embedded in these technologies will in time create major shifts in culture.

Jimmy (whose presentation is available in chunks here) described in some detail the operation of the non-profit Wikipedia and the for-profit Wikia, whose aim is to foster a world of free content (free as in speech, not beer, as Jimmy put it). In that sense, the aim is to give every person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikipedia is already seen by 6.19% of internet users every day, way ahead of major news organisations. Other key points made were:

• monocultures are unsafe;
• it is important to have space for people to disagree safely;
• accountability deals with security issues because you can always see who did what;
• Wikipedia should be a starting point for research, not an end point;
• a number of initiatives are now coming together to create “a base layer of raw cultural materials” online;
• we’re seeing the rise of a new “culture of sharing and creativity which is not based on market exchange but rather on intellectual exchange”;
• wikis are not so much about the software but the culture of the community/organisation;
• Wikipedia is not so much a technical innovation but a social innovation;
• in Wikipedia, authority comes from respect.

For interest, you might also like to take a look at the video of the Chaser’s War on Everything prank 10 Questions posed to Jimmy in Sydney.

Mark Pesce (whose podcast and slides are available here) argued that the question “What is the truth?” has now become “Who do you trust?”. There is a potentially a clash of cultures between the Wikpedia model and the older encyclopedic model; has the culture of expertise, he asked, been out-evolved by distributed authority? He concluded by predicting a coming war between elites (who’ve traditionally possessed knowledge), special interests (who try to shape knowledge to their own ends), and communities (which are just becoming aware of the knowledge latent within them – and are beginning to use tools like wikis to harness that knowledge).

During the Perth panel discussion (a podcast of which is available), Mal Bryce, of IVEC, suggested that knowledge sharing is the lubricant of the knowledge economy, adding that information which is shared is information which is enhanced. Control freaks, he claimed, have no place in the emerging order. He agreed with comments made earlier in the day to the effect that more than anything else, it’s about changing the culture rather than grabbing the tools.

Tags: e-learning, web 2.0, wikis, Wikipedia, distributed knowledge, peer-produced networks, eduausem2007.