Brent Kearney

Rick Watson, MIS professor at the University of Georgia, is heading up an effort to create free text books for the developing world, using wiki technology. He has recruited about 80 academics, and with the recent press, he will likely get many more.

My first impression was great — wiki textbooks for developing countries! Now all they need is computers, electricity and Internet access, not to mention shelter, food and clean water. However, the plan is to print the textbooks that are created using wiki technology.

An interesting aspect of the story is the proposed solution to the problem of authoritative accuracy: new content that has not been editorially reviewed will appear in a different colour. Presumably such text will not be included in the print version. I like the idea, and its one that Wikipedia could consider adopting.

In fact, Wikipedia should take it a step further, and introduce an editorial control using peer voting. Sites like Digg.com exploit the power of the masses to vote on news stories — the most popular gets to be “front page” news. Similarly, Wiki editors could get votes for their authority on particular topics. A professor of physics, for example, would likely get more votes for his wiki contribution on the refraction of light through a prism, and a professor of social studies would get less votes for a contribution on the same article. Their contributions could be colour-coded according to their authority level.

Similarly, if a contributor has a high enough authority rating for a particular topic, they should be able to “sign off” on a contribution. Thus you would get a democratic editorial control mechanism. For example, suppose a student of physics starts the article on prisms with a couple of paragraphs. The contribution would be marked with some authority, but could be higher. Then a physics professor contributes and is voted to have very high authority. That professor is now allowed to mark the article as having passed editorial review.

Accounts on the wiki system would need to be taken more seriously for this to work. A more sophisticated identity verification system would need to be in place, at least for contributors who wish to be eligible for authority votes. Otherwise unscrupulous contributors could pretend to have credentials that they do not really possess.