Wikiscanner not for me

When I heard about Wikiscanner, I was immediately interested. It seems to provide a way of gaining unusually personal insight into people and organizations.

Have you ever wondered if people in the New York Police Department are busy, busy, busy all day long? Just scan the department’s IP addresses through Wikiscanner to see if they’ve had time to help build the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. If they have, maybe they’re not as busy as they’re depicted to be in the movies.

It’s an interesting concept and one that’s probably useful to some people sometimes; however, as I undertook the task of doing a report about the changes made by the people in one company, I started to think that beyond providing some things to laugh at, it wasn’t much use.

After scanning the IP addresses of more than 10 companies, I noticed a trend: each company had some people who appeared to be making meaningful contributions to Wikipedia pages that contain information that pertain to their company and some people make contributions to pages about hobbies (or at least nonwork related interests). Almost every company had someone who contributed to a college or university Wikipedia page. Further, in all of my wikiscanning, I never found any results that were more recent than 2007.

All in all, I found it impossible to draw any conclusions about a company based solely on my viewing of its employees Wikipedia habits.

The one thing I think Wikiscanner could be useful for is during job searching. Perhaps a job seeker who is interested in a specific company in a specific location could do a wikiscan on it to see what kinds of things the employees are working on and interested in. The drawback to that is it might not be an accurate measure.

Beyond that, while Wikiscanner is cool and interesting, I’m not sure how useful it is to most people.

(Note: the links in paragraph 4 are all from af.mil at the Pentagon).

Wikis, wikis, everywhere

Ah, wikis. Until recently I was ambivalent about them, and then I dove into a research paper about a topic that I wasn’t very familiar with. I am no longer ambivalent – I’m a huge fan!

Sure, there are some people who argue that they’re irrelevant because the information posted to them doesn’t have to be verified as accurate. Even though that argument is credible (although slightly flawed), lets explore why these sites are still tremendously valuable.

As I embarked on my journey into this research paper, I started at Google, which probably doesn’t come as a big surprise — Google search term: “marketing.” The first entry in my Google-recommended sites was Wikipedia. I wasn’t hopeful that it would benefit me much, but I gave it a try.

The thing that I discovered was that I didn’t have to rely on its information to be accurate, but because it’s a link-filled document that gives some background and history, I could use it as sort of my ground zero for research on the topic.

I think academicians should steer clear of using it as a final word on anything, but any academic research worth its salt will be verified by multiple sources anyway. I guess if I were a college professor and had assigned my students to write a research paper, I would be quick to add that any information gathered from a wiki should be verified by at least one other source. The thing is, with all the links on an average wiki, that’s pretty easy to do.

The other benefit to these sites is that they can be updated quickly, easily and frequently. I was just looking through the histories of a few Wikipedia pages and found that many of them were updated more than four times a day, often by the same few people, who have taken to cleaning up vandalism or checking facts and grammar.

I suppose wikis would strike me as a bit more credible in and of themselves if an “expert” were to watch over them, but then, that would destroy the beauty of the sites’ functionality.