Chaos or Cable TV?—How much control is enough?

I find myself returning again and again to a discussion about how social software impacts our own control over information as "information professionals." This focus (obsession) may say something about me and my general tendency to impose order/control, or it may say something about the cosmic shift that appears to be happening in how we think of the web, the information we put there, the way we organize it, how much interaction we expect, and how much we trust the public at large.

In the past 2 weeks, we’ve looked at how blogs can act as both a personal and professional means of sharing knowledge, we’ve looked at how RSS feeds can help us organize the massive influx of information swirling around on the web, and we’ve looked at how social tagging can create communities of users taking control of their own information organization. And now, as we head into this week’s discussion of wikis, we are looking, in a fundamental sense, at our own perceptions of the webpages that pop up on our screens.

In Brian Lamb’s article "Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not," he looks to web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee as he thinks back at the 1990s and the integration of the web into our information world. Berners-Lee says,

"I wanted the Web to be what I call an interactive space where everybody can edit. And I started saying “interactive,” and then I read in the media that the Web was great because it was “interactive,” meaning you could click. This was not what I meant by interactivity."

His “vision of a genuinely interactive environment rather than ‘a glorified television channel’—one in which people not only would browse pages but also would edit them as part of the process—did not disappear with the rise of the read-only Web browser. It’s churning away more actively than ever, in a vivid and chaotic Web-within-the-Web, via an anarchic breed of pages known as “wikis.’” And so, it appears, that even in its conception, the web was supposed to be a place of interaction, not just another version of cable tv. But somehow, maybe because of limitations in software or skill, we ended up with this idea of web pages being “mine” or “yours” or “the library’s,” and not the communities.

Key stage right, the social software craze.] So here we are, in our wikipedia world of interaction and instant information. Now what do we do? And can we do what we have the technology to do? Meredith’s article, “Using Wikis to Create Online Communities,” asks us to think about our own ideas of how we define “property” and, ultimately, “trespassing” on the web. She says,

"It can be difficult for people to get used to the idea of a website that anyone is allowed to add to or edit. The notion of private property is so deeply embedded in our society that it’s difficult to imagine going onto someone else’s website and changing things, even when they want us to. We’re accustomed to websites where someone is the final arbiter on what can or cannot go into it. With a wiki, everyone is the final arbiter...The wiki will develop organically to reflect the interests and needs of the group who worked on it."

Sounds great, right? But I wonder what my goal would be in creating a page my users could edit, and I would have to wonder if, in reality, I was actually looking for major contributions or just editorial comments. Taking this to the extreme, do we want to surrender control over the structure of our library homepage? What's an information professional to do?!?

Well, as Lamb suggests, we should give into the chaos. He says that for wikis to work, "the participants need to be in control of the content—you have to give it over fully." He goes on to conclude that it's not enough for us to adjust the technical configuration and delivery, we have to challenge "the social norms and practices of the course as well." Okay, so what does that look like in the real world? And, realistically, what can we expect from our users? And, again realistically, what should we expect from our users? In the Lamb article, this time providing a quote by Clay Shirky, I found this little pearl: "A wiki in the hands of a healthy community works. A wiki in the hands of an indifferent community fails. The software makes no attempt to add "process" in order to keep people from doing stupid things." And I suppose, from a critical standpoint, what we need to consider when opening up our pages for editing by John/Jane Q. Public, is whether we really want to hear what they have to say. Obviously, no one is suggesting putting all MARC records in wiki form, but how far will we go in allowing for contributions/edits? In time, will all wikis actually self-regulate themselves?

I have been thinking about how we can use a wiki (or these social software tools in general) to allow for user input for our finding aids. I have grandeous ideas of free flowing ideas, building our knowledge base, and collection descriptions that contain every piece of information that can be included. And then I float back down to reality. As inspiring as this theory of the great democratization of information and knowledge sharing is, I have my doubts… Again quoting Lamb, "[h]uman nature being what it is, to allow free access to hard-earned content is to indulge open-source utopianism beyond reason."