Wikipedia and Open Space...the beginning of something bigger?

[Justin T. Sampson]

Hi Suzanne & Everyone,

The essential thing about Wikipedia style is that they really do want to be
an encyclopedia. That does mean that it's not a place to post anything
really personal or original. But it doesn't necessarily have to exclude the
subjective experience, as long as that experience has been documented
somewhere else.

The "evidence" that's needed isn't scientific evidence that Open Space
"works" or anything like that; think of it more as documentary evidence
about who practices Open Space, how they do so, and notable events in its
history. The most appreciated documentary evidence will be in the form of
papers in peer-reviewed journals, articles in reliable newspapers, books
published by reputable presses, and so forth. Here's a page describing
"reliable sources" in detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS

So the first step is to gather together all the available references -- all
the articles and books that have been published about Open Space, its
history, and how it relates to other meeting styles. That would be the basis
for a really solid Wikipedia article.

Cheers,
Justin (who's only done a very tiny bit of Wikipedia editing)


On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Suzanne Daigle <sdaigle4 at comcast.net>wrote:

>  What a day!  Lisa, Arthur, Shufang…amazing the places this has been
> taking us in the on-going world-wide conversation about oslist and ning.
>
>
>
> On another matter, Michael Herman today appealed to us for help on what he
> called  “tremendous editing” work required on the Wikipedia Open Space
> description. I went to the Wiki website to see what was there. I cringed
> when I saw the alerts at the top of the page:  “reads like an
> advertisement”; “blatant advertising” could lead to “speedy deletion”;
> “insufficient context”; “missing citations and footnotes” and requires
> “clean-up to meet Wikipedia standards”.  I then started to dig deeper
> through pages and pages to understand the  Wikipedia standards, guidelines
> and criteria.  Part of me felt that if I was to help on this  (along with
> other OS folks hopefully?),  I’d have to write and conform to a structure of
>  “predictability”,  “control”, “data”, “verifiability” and “neutral point of
> view” that could miss the point of what Open Space is all about. The
> Wikipedia focus seems to be much more on the objective than the subjective.
>  Out of curiosity, I checked other modalities like Appreciative Inquiry and
> Future Search and saw some of the same alert messages there too. I then went
> to Lean Manufacturing, and Six Sigma – no alerts! Interesting.
>
>
>
> Somehow it felt that if I was tackling this (with others?), it would be
> like describing Chinese medicine on the basis of evidence-based Western
> medicine? I now understand what Michael said when he talked about the
> “tremendous” editing not because what’s there was poorly done but because of
> their rigorous (and limiting?) criteria.
>
>
>
> Or… perhaps there’s another way of looking at it.  Maybe the time has come
> for a group of folks out there to take up the *mainstream* Wikipedia
> challenge to further document this experiential “experiment” that Harrison
> challenges us on in his latest book, Wave Rider. Who knows where it could
> lead?  Perhaps this documentation already exists and we could draw from it?
> It appears there would be lots of “evidence” from the nearly 25 years, in
> 140+ countries, in (hundreds of thousands?) or (thousands and thousands?) of
> situations, stories, learnings, etc.
>
>
>
> With some trepidation, I’m putting this out there to the OS universe.
> Certainly with my still limited experience in Open Space, don’t think this
> could be a solo initiative on my part. That being said, as we typically do
> in Open Space, I’d like to post a topic “Wikipedia and Open Space”.  Anyone
> want to join? Maybe we’ll set up a room on the new Ning.  My interest is
> that I feel we are at a tipping point in the world with Open Space based on
> the multiple system breakdowns everywhere.  Lots of opportunity for
> transformation and making a meaningful difference.  Anyone want to join?
> Suzanne
>
>
>
>
>
> Suzanne Daigle**
>
> Managing Partner, US Operations**
>
> Tel:  941-359-8877**
>
> *sdaigle4 at comcast.net*
>

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20091118/69e17475/attachment-0016.htm>