Bad News Travels Wiki-fast

Charlton Heston and Skybus might never have come up in the same conversation... and might not ever again for that matter! But I raise them now not just because this weekend we said goodbye to both the esteemed actor and the low-cost, Columbus-based airline, but because of the manner in which their passing was written into history.

If you've read The OPEN Brand, you know I'm a fan of Wikipedia--not just because it's the world's largest collaborative encyclopedia, but because it's evolved into a news site--and a site that's incredibly reliable for the speed in which it updates. (In the book we cite The New York Times reporting from July 1, 2007 that 250 of the "most recent changes to the English-language Wikipedia were made in the last 60 seconds".) Just as search engines have become my back-up dictionary (we need to know how everyone is spelling all these words we're making up if we want them to find what we have to say about them, right?), Wikipedia is a piece of my news-gathering regimen.

Whether the information is right or wrong or even slightly off-base, it's out there fast and the buzz (or "discussion") behind the article can be even more telling. For example, with Heston, the discussion tab includes conversation around the photo used in the article and whether a more recent one is available, copyright violation because someone stole content from IMDB, Heston's infamous "cold, dead hands" quote, plus style and grammar points.

On Skybus' entry, one of the sources says he/she got the information from a job interview with the airline, which of course prompted a discussion about whether information from an interview is public and ended up revealing interesting information about wages. For the most part these discussions are about facts, but they bring energy and interest to these entries and others.

Fast, in and of itself, is good, but it's not unique. Wiki-fast gets me not just fast news, but the back story, the conversation, the human side of the story. Of course, human may also mean imperfect, but the Wikipedia community works doggedly to monitor and manage the information. Take for example how ad agency Modernista recently made its Wikipedia entry the site's homepage (talk about OPEN!). The chatter on the entry's discussion page debates the appropriateness of this move by the agency, plus it's a fascinating peak into the rapidly changing goings-on of the social web--and I learned a new phrase ("Wikimorally wrong") I can spell-check on Google.