Darwikinism (and monkeying around)

Finally, it seems that Wikipedia has got a handle on things. Several announcements over the last few weeks have dragged the popular online user generated encyclopaedia into a semblance of trustworthiness. With over 60 million users each month, perhaps it is about time, if only to convince my fellow academics and colleagues that Wikipedia does after all have a place in the process of educating our students. I know, I know, there have been some notorious debates about how Wikipedia is just as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica - and there have been many detractors too, such as Andrew Keen who famously claimed that Web 2.0 was similar to content generated by monkeys with typewriters. There are similar debates too about whether or not students should be allowed to reference Wikipedia sources in their assessed work.

Recently, Wikipedia has drafted in a legion of volunteer editors to ensure that the contents of its pages are as trustworthy as possible. And here's the next news in the saga of its ongoing development: From this autumn, Wikipedia will introduce a new colour coding system where initially entered content will be flagged with an orange background to indicate that it is yet to be verified for accuracy. As more editors and contributors work on the text or content, so the background colour dissipates until it is pure white, indicating that the content is as accurate as possible. It's going to be the survival of the fittest content - a kind of textual evolutionary process that we will see from now on.

My colleague Maged Boulos and I wrote about destructive and creative evolutionary processes in the natural selection of online content back in 2007. We were by no means the first to do so, but we never the less outlined a number of editing and content generation styles that included deletionism, inclusionism and .... Darwikinism. Darwikinism is the name given to the social processes that shape the content of online collaborative spaces, and I would argue that it also refers to the generation and transmission of memes, in a manner similar to the passing on of genetic information. There is also the potential for memetic mutation of course, so there will inevitably be content that slips in under the net, so to speak.... Time will tell whether Wikipedia develops a better reputation among sceptical academics and teachers, but it is a move up the evolutionary tree, and the monkeys with typewriters may begin to look a little more human...

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