Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are the product of the dedicated minority.

In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.
Chris Wilson

Unlike Wilson, I have no problem with the flimsy veneer of democracy being peeled back from these sites, as I am not particularly interested in the ideology of social media; but the reality of maintaining Wikipedia does provide some salient lessons for public sector organizations seeking to implement these content management systems.

Resourcing

The first point that these findings suggest is that while the wiki will cost (virtually) nothing to set up, it does require dedicated resource to make it a success. This would be in the form of staff whose statements of accountability include curatorial responsibility for the content, and software that supports them in this role.

Some of the tasks that they might be entrusted with range from flagging redundancies, locking pages and migrating content into other wikis or the enterprise document management system, archiving superseded content, through to jointly managing the taxonomic structure of the site.

Without these sorts of controls, particularly over an extended period of time, you run the risk of, at best, the quality and discoverability of the content will inevitably degrade, and the worst case is that you breach the Public Records Act.

Documentation

Just because it is a social media project, doesn’t mean that you can avoid your due diligence. Terms of Reference spelling out the objectives, governance and – most importantly – your content management strategy. That’s right: what are you going to do down the track with this thing? Is it a case of just install and leave it for the next generation to deal with? Or assess after 18 months, migrate everything useful into another platform and archive the lot?

The other, perhaps equally important, benefit of documentation is that you can share it. If your agency does start experimenting with wikis, then it would helpful for your peers if as much of what you did, learned and, if necessary, bungled could be made available, so we avoid the costs of multiple agencies figuring this out for themselves.

One other point about the paperwork: in terms of selling the project to senior management, having robust documentation will get you a lot further than a Govt 2.0 elevator pitch. If that documentation includes another agency’s post-implementation review and/or final assessment of their project, you are making it as easy as practicable for them to agree.

Conclusion

Providing clarity for your organization about what the wiki will (and won’t) be used for, who will be responsible for managing it to success and how they will be supported in that role, should be a methodical and deliberate process.

If we expect to see these tools become part of the standard enterprise suite for public sector agencies in the immediate future, then we need to manage their initial implementations with particular care and attention to detail — and resist the temptation built into the utility of the product to just fire them up and hope for the best.

The data-mining tool, WikiScanner, which compiles and mashes up information that has always been available, matches IP addresses with the edits stored in the history pages in Wikipedia. The result? Well, let’s just say that for some organizations, it has been a little embarrassing…

Some of the first organizations to get outed for whitewashing their articles were Diebold and Wal-Mart. Of course, it wasn’t long before public sector organizations were also being exposed: in this case, the FBI and CIA.

The question you are all asking now is, what about my agency? Well, preliminary investigations revealed that, yes, some diligent New Zealand public servants had been editing their agency’s Wikipedia page.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this practice, per se. Given that Wikipedia is such a heavily used resource, (according to this Pew survey, Wikipedia has become the number 1 external site visited after Google’s search page, receiving over half of its traffic from the search engine), if your agency does have a page then you want to make sure that it is correct. What you don’t want to be doing is spinning or misrepresenting the truth.

The other thing you really don’t want to be doing –particularly from your work machine– is editing the page of your Minister (or anyone else in Parliament, for that matter).

Now, none of this is in the same class as Exxon Mobil editing the Exxon Valdez oil spill page, which is nothing short of breathtaking in its audacity and, given the transparency of Wikipedia, idiotic in its execution.

It does, however, remind us all that reputation management on the Internet is a very different discipline. Google never forgets, and neither does Wikipedia. Every edit on this mammoth site is preserved for posterity. And, unless you are using a proxy, each and every of those edits is traceable back to the organization that made them.

If you are going to effectively manage your agency’s reputation in this space, remember that, as a public servant, you are held to a higher standard. Make sure you have a thorough understanding of how social media work, and the principles you should be observing when you interact with them.

Update: 24/8/07

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on Australian public servants editing Wikipedia, that really highlights the pitfalls of not understanding the social media you are interacting with.

Not only were his qualifications bogus but — and I am reading between the lines here — his crib notes were so lowbrow:

…he was in fact Ryan Jordan, 24, a college student from Kentucky who used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies. He has now retired from the site.

Now, I am a big fan of Wikipedia. I think that it is a great resource and I think that it is an even more important experiment. Can human beings use social media to aggregate knowledge, and harness the power of collective intelligence? The answer has to be yes. It is happening before our eyes.

A recent assessment of the accuracy of the content on Wikipedia found that it compared favourably to Encyclopedia Brittanica:

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia,” reported Nature.

But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

Given that the content is all written by volunteers (albeit some of whom obviously have pretty heavyweight academic credentials) and can be edited by anyone with Internet access and some spare time, I am surprised and delighted by the site’s performance.

Does the exposure of Mr Jordan jeopardise the project or the site itself? Not at all. I’m not sure what sort of obscure information is included in the texts that he was referencing (whether angels have bodies?) but if I was looking for an authoritative source, Wikipedia wouldn’t be my first, or my only, reference: caveat lector.

Having said that, I would equally have no problem going to Catholicism for Dummies for this sort of information. I am sure that it was written by someone with an impeccable theological pedigree and it has the additional recommendation of having worked so brilliantly for Mr Jordan.

As the name suggests, it is a wiki for quotes — well, sort of a wiki. That’s right, rather than pay someone to laboriously enter all those quotes into a database, they have decided to harness the power of collective intelligence. So, once you sign up, you can add quotes, tag them and add them to your favoutites.

You can also vote for quotes, which introduces the digg factor, an important element in any social media start-up’s business plan. And, to round out their Web 2.0™ credibility index, they also have a blog and a podcast.

I don’t want to sound too cynical, but do you think that this is really going to take off? To me, it seems a bit too much like a cash-in. Having said that, I have signed up anyway…

Wikipedia defines astroturfing as:

formal public relations (PR) campaigns which seek to create the impression of being a spontaneous, grassroots behavior. Hence the reference to the “AstroTurf” (artificial grass) is a metaphor to indicate “fake grassroots,” or sometimes “fake environmentalism.”

And, I know you will be shocked to learn -as I was, this practice is surprisingly commonplace. Walmart, the largest retailer in the US, has recently been outed for this sort of dodgy campaign.

They cunningly sent up a blog purporting to be the record of a couple of ‘ordinary Americans’ travelling in a motor home across the US, stopping in Walmart parking lots. Yeah, killer material.

Now, I am not sure what tipped people off to the fact that this was a stunt (other than the content of the blog), but what is really interesting is that the genius behind this “cutting-edge” marketing ploy (at least I imagine that is how it was sold to the Walmart execs) is a long time PR guru who has his own blog.

Does this strike you as odd? Here is a guy who blogs himself, but was insufficiently savvy to realize that this venture was, to use the technical term, a really stupid idea. Of course the ruse would be seen through. Of course it would be traced back to the PR firm. It’s Walmart, people! They are not exactly a low-profile, under-the-radar sort of organisation, are they?

This is a textbook example of applying old models of thinking about public afffairs and communications to new media. And guess what? They just don’t work. A blog, as the PR guru should know, is a specific sort of channel that is defined, in part, by the wider community of bloggers, the ‘blogosphere.’ It is not a simple case of signing on to WordPress and spruiking your wares. There are conventions to observe, like, for example:

• be honest
• allow comments, so it is a discussion
• don’t fill it with the corporate orthodoxy
• engage people

Now PR guru-guy has been blogging since September 2004, which pretty much puts him up-there in the early adopter stakes, but the fact that he still cooked up, or approved, this lame campaign suggests that he hasn’t really grasped the fundamentals of the new media.

And there is a lesson here for all of us: yes, blogs are cool; they are a channel that we all should be aware of and understand, just don’t go rushing out and launching a blog for your agency without giving it a great deal of considered thought. In fact, the question you should really be asking is: why should (insert agency name here) be blogging? Not: why not?

UPDATE

Russell Brown links to this story about Roche’s astroturfing over Herceptin. It sort of makes PR guru-guy above look like a dilettante…