Wiki-lawyers
The Economist has a good article “The battle for Wikipedia’s soul” that explores the rift opening up between two Wikipedia factions. The factions are the “inclusionists”, who essentially believe that Wikipedia should include information on any and every topic that an individual is willing to invest the time to write about, and the “deletionists”, who argue that Wikipedia should adhere to strict criteria regarding which subjects are worthy of being on the the site. The battle seems to be getting bloody, as one faction has come to calling the other faction “wiki-lawyers.”
The behavior of Wikipedia’s self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as “wiki-lawyering”
Notwithstanding the not-so-flattering allusion to the legal profession, this ideological split is yet another sign that user-generated content (UGC) is coming of age. Google, with its planned “knol” service, seems to be on the side of the inclusionists, betting that the community of consumers can be effective at arbitrating what content is useful, particularly if articles include information on the writer’s credentials.
We’ve had similar discussions inside Avvo, particularly as it pertains to expanding the content on our site and to what degree the content should be “editorial” vs. “user-generated”, or a mix of both. While UGC has the advantage of tapping into the unique expertise of a broad population of individuals, there is the potential for UGC spam that does not exist with a purely editorial model. When we did the initial planning for Avvo, we felt that the best approach would be a combination of the two. Thus, the Avvo Rating essentially gives an editorial “opinion”, and this is enahnced with UGC from both lawyers and consumers.
In any case, I was pleased to see that Wikipedia’s entry on deletionism and inclusionism has survived the wrath of the deletionists on Wikipedia itself.