Saturday, June 05, 2010

Government and Wikipedia (Warning: Off-Color Word)

This New York Times article describes a deal between the British Museum  and Wikipedia.  It seems the Museum has realized that people go to Wikipedia to look up information on the Museum, much more than they go to the museum's web site.  So the museum decided: if you can't fight them, join them (or something like that). By cooperating with Wikipedia, they can get more info and more accurate info into the browsers of the users, which presumably in the long run benefits the museum.

The lead guy says: "“Ten years ago we were equal, and we were all fighting for position,” Mr. Cock said. Now, he added, “people are gravitating to fewer and fewer sites. We have to shift with how we deal with the Web.”

I don't know why the same logic doesn't work for all official sites which try to push information--put a good deal of effort into upgrading the Wikipedia pages and, in a pet peeve of mine, making your pages accessible to Google.  Of course, Wikipedia is skeptical of having bureaucrats updating pages on their own bureaucracy, but this is, I think, the wave of the future.

No comments: