UPDATE: An interesting related project by Penguin Books is A Million Penguins, letting anyone edit a book to be published. The wiki is down at the moment, but PaidContent notes it began with “It had snowed, and was now raining. Gritty slush covered the pavement. Sharp crystals of snow decorated grass.” Reuters notes the challenge is finding “believable fictional voice” within the mass collaboration. This was a big challenge for group editing of the Wired Wiki story.
The last chapter of Don Tapscott's new book, Wikinomics, invites readers to write it: “Join us in peer producing the definitive guide to the twenty-first-century corporation on www.wikinomics.com.” Today we launched a Socialtext wiki for the Wikinomics Playbook, where people can not only learn about the power of mass collaboration, but participate in it. The book is already one of the fastest selling business titles and is an excellent primer on how models of collaboration are unfolding from open source to blogging to wikis in the enterprise to enable people to participate in the economy like never before.
The second to last chapter is about enterprise wikis. Half of it discusses how Best Buy is using a wiki knowledge-base for the Geek Squad. The other half is an interview with yours truly and shares some of Socialtext's success stories. The first chapter is available online as a pdf.
This is a great example of how a book can be augmented with a wiki, as most books are out of date by the time they are published, never quite finished and have the potential for participation. Last month we helped Larry Lessig share the entire Code 2.0 book in a wiki. I expect that soon such commons-peer production, a wiki for every book, will be common.
