Peer Production

Mon, 07/28/2008 - 07:01 — hirshon

Peer Production

In the July 2006 issue, Chris Anderson in Wired named peer production as one of the top six trends that are changing the world. Since then, everything from Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, and political blogs to tagging sites and virtual libraries (such as Shelfari) have boomed with content that is being generated constantly by amateurs who do their work for free, which is having a profound impact as to what is available to libraries and how the publishing industry will rework itself in future.

There is ample evidence that peer production is now affecting commercial enterprises, and not just in the individual contribution to sites such as Amazon. For example, the Encyclopaedia Britannica recently announced that as a complement to the tightly-edited entries, they will create a function to allow the user community to contribute articles. These new articles will be clearly marked and run alongside the edited reference pieces. EB explained that “readers and users will also be invited into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannica’s site under their own names.” The core encyclopedia itself “will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and will bear the imprimatur ‘Britannica Checked’ to distinguish it from material on the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible.”

In a related development, Jimmy Wales noted that Wikipedia entries have become “more detailed, more accurate, hopefully better written, fleshed out more, with more references and more citations. …Over time the community has gotten more and more rigorous about sourcing.” He also noted that a new feature of the German Wikipedia is a "flag revisions" feature that allows the community to flag a particular version of an article to show that the article has been vetted. Wikipedia will “still allow further editing, but if you really wanted one that as of three months ago we had three Ph.D.'s look at it, and they checked it off as being good, you could see that. …The flagged versions could be cited more comfortably by an academic.” Consideration is also being given to extend this feature to other Wikipedia editions, including the one in English.

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