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Wikinomics Playbook: Collaborative Book Editing

Ross Mayfield points to another interesting wiki-experiment: the authors of Wikinomics, a fast-selling new business book opened up Chapter 11 (no, this is not *that* Chapter 11) to collective editing, leaving it to the public to “finish” the book.

The Wikinomics Playbook is a Socialtext-based wiki with minimum initial content that anyone can contribute to. It will likely never be “finished” as such. Unlike the recent Wired Wiki experiment, this project is open-ended, without a firm deadline. It will be interesting to observe how the absence of any incentive to wait for last minute edits (a’la eBay auction sniping) leads to different behaviors.

For now, I sense the experiment is going somewhat sideways: page content is not growing as much as comments are. I guess it’s easier to talk about it than actually doing it (hm… that’s what I am doing, toosmile_embaressed ), but that carries the risk of the Playbook becoming just another discussion forum. Perhaps we should all heed the advice under Be Bold:

“Being bold is necessary advice in wikis: most people aren’t accustomed to editing each other’s sentences. In a wiki participants must be bold because it is only by many iterative edits that mass intelligence can occur and wisdom can triumph over verbosity. If we are bold the content will evolve.”

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Comments

  1. Hello Mr. Erdos,

    manual trackback, please go here:

    http://www.frogpond.de/index.php/archive/contributing-to-collaborative-book-editing/

    Greetings,

    Martin

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    Apologies, I don’t mean to offend anyone… but there’s no other way to refer to Stanford Prof. Bob Sutton’s book, “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t”.   The Harvard Business School Press refu…

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