(Via Joi Ito) Interesting posting on how the Wikipedia, as it matures both in content and access technology, needs to address issues of systemic bias. I am currently fiddling with using a wiki in a corporate research context, and have quickly found that the technology may be more limited than I thought – for instance, it may be problematic in situations where the content you want to produce is linear in nature and not easily can be split into bits that can be easily named (and CamelCased…..).
However, while the easy internal linking of a wiki may be less useful in a corporate project setting than the many-versioned editing capability. We’ll see how things go as the project progresses.
As for Wikipedia, the fact that its content reflects its creators is not really, to me, a big concern. Rather than impose different behavior on the creators, why not just get more contributors from populations outside the white, male, online, and educated classes? After all, an organization should reflect the complexity of its environment.