After the Wikimania panel on Enterprise 2.0, I rolled up my sleeves and tried to improve the Enterprise 2.0 Wikipedia article. All that activity caught the eye of an Admin doing his job, who excersized speedy deletion. Little did I know the article had already been deleted, primarily because it failed to meet the neologism criteria.
At first, I was a bit shocked, as my work disappeared. It also took a bit of effort to understand the rules at play and try to picture the process over time and scale. While away this weekend, a minor blogstorm happened around the deletion. Dan Farber and Jeff Nolan have some great wrap-up posts and David Tebbutt captured some emails that flew around. But as I like to say -- blogs are a sprint, wikis are a marathon.
Articles that already failed an Article for Deletion test is a candidate for speedy deletion which any Admin can do for good reason. The appropriate response is to first for clarification by the Admin who did the speedy deletion. You can also request a History Undelete, which does not require a vote, to build a case. But ultimately, in order to have the article restored, it requires a re-vote.
I had the history undeleted for the Enterprise 2.0 Article here. I invite contributions to help make it more robust, and draw in more reputable and diverse sources that may help it meet the neologism criteria. I think it is important to give it time before following the process for a revote, but express your opinions on the Discusssion page.
At one point every term was a neologism, language evolves, faster for some people, and the new becomes mainstream. What's interesting is that Andy McAfee's initial Enterprise 2.0 definition (freeform social software adapted for business) still stands, but is being extended in consistent ways. Jeff Nolan's insight that enterprise mashups are of processes, while Web 2.0 mashups are more simply data, is significant. Vinnie challenges us further. Dion Hinchcliffe offers up a definition of Enterprise 2.0 (richer than what I quote) as liberation:
Enterprise 2.0 in general describes the liberation of often previously inaccessible corporate information to be opened up to general discoverability, consumption, and reuse using a Web-based model.
Remember e-Business? When the web intersected with enterprise software, a new front-end was accessible across firewalls, consumers learned to interface directly (while being "managed") with transactions that went straight through the back office and across the value chain. Now think about how the web, and its people, have evolved. It makes sense that the web will reinvent enterprise software again. Participatory models, mass collaboration and the economies of speed, scope and span mashups afford will make us re-think process itself. Part of it is the liberation of information, but most of it is tools that don't get in people's way. Which especially matters when they are trying to work together.
