The power of wikis

Since I discovered Wikipedia I know how powerful wikis can be. The wisdom and collaboration power of the crowd is unbeatable, many, including me,  see Wikipedia as a more comprehensive source of information than any other encyclopedia – as the ultimate repository of the knowledge of human mankind.

Today I have been reading about  the “GuttenPlag Wiki” in the German instance of heise online. People outside of Germany might not have any idea what “GuttenPlag” could stand for, so let me explain: Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg has been the  prior Minister of Defence of Germany, he resigned on March 1st 2011 after it had been discovered that much (actually most) content of his dissertation had been “re-used” from other sources without explicitly mentioning this in his paper. That’s what made his dissertation  a plagiarism, and that’s what this wiki “GuttenPlag” is all about: more than 1000 people collaborated to finally discover 371 of 393 pages ( 94 % ) containing plagiarism. In the wiki you get a nice visualization of his paper showing every single page color coded to indicate one or many plagiarisms. In total 1218 have been found, any you can read every single page and plagiarism, compare his writing with the original text and get some info about the source he “re-used” in his paper and whether he clearly referenced that source in his paper or not.

Besides the wisdom of the crowd a few tools have been used and are mentioned here to discover plagiarism.

Again it becomes clear what a crowd of motivated people can achieve when enabled through the power of social software. The board of examiners who initially checked his work apparently was not able to properly asses the true quality of his work.

In an explanation on the wiki home page the authors of the wiki make clear that their intention is not to influence politics in a particular direction. The wiki is more meant to ensure a high quality of scientific work in Germany and to facilitate as a demonstration of what they call collaborative plagiarism discovery.

The wiki now has been nominated for the Grimme Online Award, similar to the German Grimme Award for television an award for online media. This wiki certainly contributed to a high extent to the fact that Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg resigned from his position as Minister of Defence of Germany and thus demonstrates the power of wikis and social computing to discover truth and even influence politics and society.

My favorites for week 8, 2011

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about cubicle landscapes

One of the many reasons why I love Dilbert comics is that they very often are about the pleasure to work in these modern cubicle landscapes our employers have crafted for us. Well, I only go there if I have to, otherwise I stay at home. Why should I go through this morning commute madness ( actually not so bad in my case; just a 20 minute car ride into Mainz, a medium size town in Germany ) just to get to a place where I actually can not work efficiently ? Anyway, here is another nice one about this topic:

Something to watch: my favorite video clip of the week – about an amazing Guitarist

Thinking outside the box might mean to use a tool in a very different way than people do usually. Watch Erik Mongrain playing his guitar in a very different way … http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/xerqg Amazing Guitarist

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about a crater in Death Valley.

"Little Hebe Crater" by stevelyon. Apparently the Little Hebe Crater must be somewhere in the Death Valley Area, as I assumed when looking at this photo by Steve Lyon, and as I confirmed through Wikipedia. I must have missed it when I was there in 1995. May be next time. You can’t see everythng when travelling…

Something to surprise: my favorite "I really didn’t know this" of the week – about facebook

Did you know that Facebook has 642 726 020 users world wide, most Facebook users come from the US, where 49 % of the population have joined this social network, Germany is on rank 11 with 16 million users, that is 19 % of all Germans in the US the majority of Facebook users are female. Source: These statistics are available here on socialbakers.

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about language

Language is the source of misunderstandings. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French writer (1900 – 1944) ~ Especially human language ! Watson did a great job last week to deal with this and win the Jeopardy! Challenge. In case you missed it you may want to head to my stream of IBM related videos on youtube and find there 6 10-minute video clips showing how the 20-minutes show episodes went last week on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, or you may just want to watch this nice 10-minute summary. A collection of articles about Watson I have collected here as a Goodle Bookmarks List.

My favorites for week 7, 2011

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about the power of social software

Social software and networks have become real powerful and allow us to get information pretty much in advance before they actually are published “officially”. Whether it is from events like Lotussphere 2011 or Watson playing Jeopardy!, social networks allow you to be ahead of others with your information and knowledge. Of course, it can be also used as some sort of “alternate communication channel”, as nicely shown in this “Reality Check” comic strip.

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about a scary looking fish

"Guess What I Had for Lunch, Plate 2" by Thomas Hawk. In weeks when I can’t find a good photo on flickr published under a CC license ( of course I don’t have the time to check out all of them all the time ), Thomas Hawk’s photostream is my last hope, since he publishes tons of good photos every day. What I also like about his photos are the creative title he uses. A good title and description to me doubles the value of a photo.

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about intellectuals

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president of US 1953-1961 (1890 – 1969) ~ That’s probably a good quote to end this blog posting.

My favorites for week 6, 2011

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about being social

How social are we these days when we meet with friends and spent most of our time with our mobiles, and when it rings we turn around and show them our backs ? Comic strips like “Moderately Confused” and “Herman” make that a topic to think about again and again …

Something to learn: my favorite tip of the week – about URLs in microblog streams

Very often URLs posted in microblog streams like the one from Lotus Connections Profile don’t work for me and I get something like this when clicking the link, e.g. from Lotus Connections Glue: The reason is that people sometimes put some character, e.g. a full stop, right behind the URL. So, before you give up, check carefully the URL in your browsers address bar and remove any strange character at the end to make it work.

Something to watch: my favorite video clip of the week – about ice bears and coke

Here is a nice commercial by Coca Cola showing how ice bears open up a bottle of Coke. A bit kitschy may be, but well done with some nice music by Phil Collins. http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/x1i4qs?width=&theme=default&foreground=%23F7FFFD&highlight=%23FFC300&background=%23171D1B&start=&animatedTitle=&iframe=0&additionalInfos=0&autoPlay=0&hideInfos=0 pub Coca-Cola

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about the Eiffel Tower in Paris

"Under the Eiffel" by Stuck in Customs. Awesome shot of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, taken by Trey Ratcliff, whom I feature here exactly one year ago. I wonder what focal length he used for this one.

Ford & you

Ford has opened up a new web site in the true sense of social software and web 2.0 allowing users to chime in and participate in all types of discussion around environment, technology and design: “Ford powered by you“. Nice idea.

My first contribution to a posting “A Dissenting View on the Environment” about the question how we – especially as someone who drives a car – should deal with “all the propaganda citing the end of the world”:

I am just reading Frank Schätzing’s book “Nachrichten aus einem unbekannten Universum” ( not sure about the English title ). It is a science book providing all the knowledge he has collected before he wrote the novel “The Swarm“.
A good part of the book is about the history of our planet and he takes the reader through all the geological eras. The beginning and start of those eras of course have been defined by human beings and the way we have defined those time stamps are that a major incidence occurred with dramatic changes for the majority of life on our planet: a meteorite impact, a major earth quake and/or tsunami, vulcano eruptions, methan gas eruptions, eruptions on the sun or birth of others stars “nearby”, moving continents and major climate changes, ice ages converting the entire planet into a snow ball, or combinations of multiple events, some taking a long time, some coming abruptly, which sometimes wiped away 90 % of life from planet Earth.
Who are we that we think we can play a major role here besides those types of events and influences ? After reading all of this I believe we pretty much over-estimate the power we think we have.
Check out for instance this chart in the German wikipedia how amount of oxygen has changed in our atmosphere during the last 1000 million years. The message simply is: dramatic changes on our planet have occurred long before the first human being started walking around on its surface.

With best regards … Axel Magard

Amazon.com: Nachrichten aus einem unbekannten Universum ISBN: 3462036904 ISBN-13: 9783462036909

I am not saying we should not do what we can do to minimize the negative impact any technology would have on this planet and our life. If we can reduce the amount of ozone, lead, asbestos, particulate dust or any other type of dangerous waste in the air we breath every day we better do it. But to what extend we can globally influence our world climate I am not so sure about, especially after reading this book I mentioned above.

Online applications – the next step …

Zoho and Google Docs are two famous examples for provider of online applications offering spreadsheets, document writing, notebooks, calendar, databases, wikis and much more online in the web without the need to install anything on your desktop. These applications have been improved to an extent that they provide lots of features meanwhile so that they become a true and useful replacement for desktop software, and also their user interfaces became so dynamic that sometimes it is hard to figure out the difference between a desktop and a web based application.

All these offerings so far have been what I would call multi-purpose tools you can use for everything during your business day.

Today Lifehacker had an article about a new offering from Zoho: Zoho People. The aim of this offering is to help your company’s HR department keep track of the org chart, recruit candidates, and quickly fill out expense and vacation forms.

After having looked at their home page and screen shots I got the feeling that online applications take the next step now. After coming up with multi-purpose tools in the recent years now the first more business specifc web applications hit the market, this one targeting Human Resource Management for companies.

How long will it take until companies run their entire business based on web applications ?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) including Material Requirements Planning (MRP), Stock / Inventory Management, Manufacturing Capacity Planning and Work Load Optimization, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Risk and Compliance solutions and Performance Management – so far everything what SAP has to offer -, Project Management, more Human Resource Management applications, and you name it …

When will all those applications be available as an easy to access and use online application ? What will be the licensing model for those offerings and what gurantee do users have that their data is safe and accurate when using those applications ?

Let me predict here that this will become a huge market in the next years.

Besides the risk, imagine the potential: if multiple supplier use the same SCM applications on the web, wouldn’t it be easier to connect those in order to better manage the entire supply chain covering all suppliers of a particular product manufacturer ? If through smart web2.0 technology and social software we can achieve to plug in Market Demand Management on the other side based on direct customer and consumer input, could we come up with the fully automated supply chain management solution by simply having integrated customer demand and supplier inventory and pipelines ?

Could applications like Zoho People access social networks in the future to discover other useful candidates to apply for an open job ? Could those HR applications explore automatically the skill of a candidate by scanning through his blog posts and wiki contributions ?

What other idea did come up in your mind after reading this ?