ME AND American presidential candidate John McCain are like peas in a pod. Both are renowned Vietnam war vets and both are seeking power by any means necessary (this stub requires validation). Mostly though, we share the habit of trying to pass off the stuff on Wikipedia as our own work, writes Richard Gillis
McCain was caught out when making a speech on Georgia after it was invaded by Russia. Congressional Quarterly found that two passages were almost identical to the country's Wiki entry, while a third bore striking resemblances (that last sentence I found on Google News, which is my other source).
My Wiki-comeuppance came around the same time, when I was interviewing South African golfer Gary Player. During my "research", I stumbled on something I thought would be interesting to ask him about.
Player has been famous for the best part of 40 years. His views on most subjects are equally well known and most interviews take a similar shape: Arnie, Jack and you? Check. Drug taking in golf? Check. Your charitable work with small African children? Check.
Apart from golf, his other love is horses, and according to the web's foremost knowledge resource, he owned and bred Broadway Flyer, which won the Epsom Derby in 1982.
"Gary, I wondered if you could talk for a moment on the emotions that ran through you when 'the Flyer', as we all know and love him, cantered to victory on that historic day? And after that, perhaps there is something to be said on the quality of the Queen's small talk in the winner's enclosure."
It's a credit to the man that he was as embarrassed for me as I was for myself - Broadway Flyer never came close to winning the Derby.
My initial response on leaving the room was to damn those geeks and all they stand for. I imagined Jason Dobbins from school sitting there in the middle of the night, updating "stubs" and going on "Let Information Be Free" demos with his workshy Wiki-mates.
The PR industry has cottoned on to the power of free information and a cottage industry, Digital PR, has developed. It employs Alistair Campbell wannabes to rewrite entries on Wiki, Facebook, MySpace and other online forums to best suit their clients. Faced with this misinformation what hope is there for the lazy journalist/politician/every student above the age of 12?
Wikinomics takes the notion of mass collaboration and runs with it until the business world is a cross between Woodstock and that place where the Tellytubbies live: millions of smiley, happy people gleefully swapping their life's work for free.
"Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation and wealth creation in way only once dreamt of," according to Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.
The theory runs that what works for open source computer programming can work for car makers, mobile telcos and other companies willing to throw open their research and development faculties and embrace anyone with an idea and a laptop.
The opposition to Wiki comes not just from people worried about its inaccuracies. "Digital Maoism" is how Jaron Lanier described it. "The problem," he says, "is not with the Wikipedia experiment itself, but with the way it has come to be regarded and used, how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly.
"The rationale of this new online collectivism is a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy."
Lanier suggests that such thinking has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left.
The fragility of the Wiki movement is highlighted this month with the publication of a book made up of the best Wikipedia entries which will sell for €19.95 a pop. Bertelsmann, the German publisher responsible, saw that the material on the Wikipedia site is free for use if you cite the source.
This goes against the Information is Free philosophy and undermines the entire Wiki philosophy. Thousands of anonymous editors and contributors gave their time and expertise for free only to be "shafted", as one irate blogger put it, by a cynical publishing deal.
