Who can you trust?

January 5th, 2006

I was reading an interesting article about wikipedia and trust in the Financial Times December 23 2005.

The article refers to a defamatory allegation about John Seigenthaler

Who can we trust? That is the question at the heart of the current controversy over Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia whose contents are available to everyone – and written by anyone.
Some regard Wikipedia as the future: a project empowering not just its users ? who currently make a million visits each day – but also its army of unpaid contributors, who thus far have created 1.8m articles in more than 100 languages.
Others dismiss the idea of an encyclopedia written by amateurs as old-fashioned 1960s utopianism. It is a view apparently vindicated by the recent furore over a Wikipedia article into which a prankster inserted a defamatory allegation against John Seigenthaler, a distinguished American journalist. The allegation went unnoticed for four months, by which time it had begun to spread.
The incident was a gift to critics of the ethos of Wikipedia and its assumption that people can be trusted to be honest and competent.
Wikipedia has announced plans to introduce more safeguards, including a ban on unregistered users editing articles and a delay for posting new versions of popular articles to allow checking.
For critics of Wikipedia, the fact that such safeguards are being introduced only now, five years after the project started, confirms Seigenthaler’s own description of the online encyclopedia as a “flawed and irresponsible research tool”. Yet the fact Wikipedia has done perfectly well so far without such safeguards could also be seen as confirmation of its basic assumption of honesty and competence.

The article states that “trust is an astonishingly fragile commodity.” And I would agree with that.

Wikipedians – as contributors to Wikipedia are known ? may thus be contributing to the grand project in order to prove to themselves they are the kind of person willing to do a decent job simply for the benefit of others.
If so, the rise of Wikipedia may be evidence that the world is not going to the dogs after all – despite what you read in the papers.

I think this reflects that communities undoubtedly form around values rather than demographics. Values here of; building something for others to benefit from. This is what technology has enabled us to do especially in a superdistributed world

And this is the challenge for marketing and businesses who have been used to controlling; messaging, content, information, distribution.

Today we search for things that we trust the most. For some its Wikipedia. For others its a blog, and its defintiely word-of-mouth

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