Janet Haven

I'm very happy to see the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Media and Democracy launch Congresspedia, the "citizen's encyclopedia on Congress that anyone can edit". The happy news is that Congresspedia is easy to use (based on the Wikipedia model), encourages citizen participation, and clearly isn't a joke. Anyone (US citizen or not) can go into any of the hundreds of pages already on Congresspedia and edit information about America's lawmakers...all 535 of them from the House and the Senate. The claim is that the site is non-partisan and encourages the beloved Wikipedian neutral point of view (or n-pov, for those in the know); most likely the major challenge will be whether they'll be able to maintain that. Given the squirmy battles in the regular Wikipedia over politicians' pages, one can't help but wonder.

But this raises a larger question about the offspring of Wikipedia; Congresspedia is essentially a sub-set of Wikipedia, hived off and put under its own name. But there's a bit of a problem of replication here. Richard Burr, the junior Republican senator from North Carolina, has a page on Wikipedia with one set of information. Richard Burr also has a page with a slightly differnt set of information on Congresspedia (and more fleshed out information, by the way, as it's a specialty Wikipedia child). Which one is definitive? Presumably, given that specialization is presumed to be better, Congresspedia's entry on Richard Burr is going to be definitive. But where does that leave the original Wikipedia? My guess is that over time, specialized Wikipedia child sites will become more popular: I've had half a dozen conversations over the past year with organizations about the utility and feasibility of a Wikipedia installation focused on a specific issue: NGOs, public health, and so on. I'm sure there are already others out there. I don't think this necessarily dilutes the utility of Wikipedia as a whole, but I'm wondering whether there will be any effort to synchronize content between Wikipedia children and the main site...either on a volunteer basis (as Wikipedia itself is written) or through some kind of Wikimedia automation. It's also a social question; will Wikipedia contributors get the same satisfaction and sense of community out of working on Wikipedia children, or will the main site continue to be the community draw? As always, the brave new world of wikipedia is worth keeping an eye on. The problems they have to solve now seem pretty clearly to be forerunners of those that a wide range of media will face in the coming years as the participatory becomes the default.