Expert wikis
Via the House of Commons, Ars Technica has this post, ‘2007: The year of the “expert” wiki?’, which discusses a new crop of wikis that use some sort of quality control mechanism via expert editors.
Though the Personality Rights Database (password to be removed soon) won’t be using the sorts of controls dicussed in the article to maintain quality, we are at least starting out with a well-researched set of materials. In addition, hopefully the wiki will attract a rich scholarly community to build out and maintain the resource at a very high quality. My first contribution outside of work will be editing the entry on Texas.
The Personality Rights Database is one of the projects I have been working on at work lately. I’ve been setting up the wiki software on my server (and making the necessary adjustments) as well as porting over the content from the original Database site. One of the issues that we have run across is the need for disclaimers — we don’t want to be seen as giving legal advice, especially since the wiki is run by a bunch of IP and IT lawyers and academics. This will certainly be an issue the operators of expert wikis will want to address so that they don’t run into trouble.
