Marshall Poe on Wikipedia

The historian Marshall Poe wrote an article and a sidebar about Wikipedia in the September 2006 edition of Atlantic Monthly. The Hive is a substantial piece that covers the development of personal online interactions from the open exchange of ideas in discussion boards to peer-to-peer data sharing to actual collaboration in the development of collective content. A Closer Look at the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) talks about the struggle within Wikipedia for a level discussion of controversial issues.

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz offers an article called Common Knowledge in the August 2006 edition of the same magazine, an overview of Poe's thinking on Wikipedia. (Poe's article contains lots of links to unfamiliar terms, which I won't repeat here.)

You can listen to Andrew Keen's interview of Poe for Politics Central on the occasion of the release of the Atlantic Monthly article. Poe reveals that "The Hive" was initially going to be called Everyone Knows Everything.

According to the Daily Iowan, "Poe makes use of the network potential in his class [He is a history professor at the University of Iowa] by having students update Wikipedia articles about subjects being discussed in class."

In April 2008, Poe participated in the Eastern Michigan University College of Arts and Sciences lecture series Wikipedia: The Democratization of Knowledge or the Triumph of Amateurs?

Poe's MemoryArchive - what he calls The Encyclopedia of Memories -- is surprisingly unWiki, non-collaborative. More of an edited story board. Submissions are made directly to Poe, who edits them and places them in the database. Contributions are then "protected" from further editing. Recent edits -- not that many -- are all attributed to Poe. It's hard to discern when submissions were even made. From my perspective, the march of progress in online collaboration that Poe talked about in The Hive takes a giant step backwards at the MemoryArchive.