Pearson, Wharton, Sloan Pair Up For WikiText Experiment

David Weinberger wrote a book online, as have plenty of others. What would happen if a large group of experts took the plunge? We’ll find out in about a year. We Are Smarter Than Me is a project by which professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and MIT’s Sloan School are encouraging their many colleagues to use wikis and the like to produce “the first networked book on business.” Pearson will publish the results next fall. It seems like an interesting experiment, but it may turn out to be unwieldy. Information Week notes: “Contributors who disagree with the community’s thinking can add their dissenting commentary, which also will be published.” This could result in sections as argumentative and muddled as some of the more contentious Wikipedia entries, but it might be a welcome break from today’s fat business textbooks, in which celebrated right-wing (Gregory Mankiw) and left-wing (Paul Krugman) are free to present their opinions, even with evidence, as incontrovertible fact. The blogs we surveyed were almost all positive about the project, but that might be because Nick Carr must not have heard about it yet. The organizers are promising a transparent writing process, so follow along and see whether this is a new way to corral knowledge or just another example of a handful of experts proving their savvy by getting other people to do their work for free.

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