COMMON GROUND - WIKIPEDIA
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From: Bruce S.
Date: Monday, February 25, 2008, 10:57 AM
Subject: Common Ground - Wikipedia
ID: 259857

I also wanted to mention -- the very substantial contribution that can be made to a "distributed creative process" by the resources available on Wikipedia.

Last summer, when I first started pulling together these various pieces for the bridge, I started looking at articles on Wikipedia -- and I was impressed and delighted to discover so many articles up there and freely available that are highly pertinent to this work.

More than that -- what I started sensing, and loving -- is that many of these articles are very well- written, clear, and contain excellent graphics. Plus, they contain many links to related themes. Bumping around on Wikipedia, I started harvesting articles as fast as I could click. There's a ton of great stuff up there.

I was into subjects like "ontology" or "taxonomy". Their presentation seems very clear, and they often use exactly the same language that emerged for me, over the years. In my own creative processes, I had to winnow this stuff down from a very eclectic and somewhat confusing list of books -- often extracting something from a engineering text, for example, that I found fascinating -- whereas the author of the book might themselves be barely aware of the broader interdisciplinary implications of their own ideas.

What this means here in this online context -- is that today, we are in a position to set up a kind of "reading list for an online seminar" -- that was simply not possible back in the days when we were first doing the BRIDGE-L discussions.

Back then, it was very tough to come up with a set of common references. You couldn't really do a high-quality online seminar, because nobody had the same source texts, and you could not reasonably expect people to go out and buy a set of textbooks or readings. We had to invent everything ourselves -- which is simply too much work.

But today -- we can just make up an organized list of links on Wikipedia -- and bingo, we've got a powerful central reading list that everybody can access for free. That's amazing. Actually, I was rather thrilled to discover this, getting the sense that maybe at long last this work was becoming feasible.

This Bridge work is very interdisciplinary. Whereas the "real world" of academic and scientific expertise tends to be highly compartmentalized -- and hence rather fragmented and scattered -- the Bridge is about pulling all the pieces together into one integral framework. In the early days, the workload to bring these pieces together was simply more than anybody could handle -- certainly more than I could handle. But today -- in one day, I could put together a powerful online library that covers 100 important topics, complete with graphic illustrations -- and anybody who cares could immediately access that material.

So, I can feel this coming. As always, thanks.