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1 

We need a system where editing is immediate and 

very simple.

2 

Getting people to contribute at all is hard, so we 

need to concentrate on letting people do things 

rather than worrying about what they shouldn’t do.

3 

The risk of letting anyone change anything is low, 

since we’ll keep a complete history of changes so 

we can quickly undo mistakes and we can hold 

irresponsible individuals accountable for any-

thing improper. (Reactive moderation rather than 

Proactive moderation.)

In general, the response was incredibly positive. 

Predictably, the main argument against this system was 

fear of improper changes to content, particularly for 

information subject to regulatory control. I would coun-

ter this argument in two ways:

1 

There are two ways to control people’s behaviour: 

social forces and technical forces. Currently, we 

successfully rely on social forces to control a wide 

range of things like who calls or emails the CEO with 

their latest crazy idea. Technical forces are powerful, 

but with each technical feature we increase training 

and raise the bar against collaboration. Surely, we 

can see if social forces will be enough for all but the 

most critical of content?

2 

Anyone can choose to monitor any content that they 

are concerned about (e.g. automatic email alert with 

changes). So, they can quickly jump in and correct 

any mistakes.

3 

For exceptional cases, we may choose to lock down 

critical content and define clear ownership and 

responsibility for its maintenance.

At the end, showing people around Wikipedia was an 

incredibly powerful way to seal the deal, particularly 

since they have often used it to find information in the 

past.

There were no major objections to trying a  Wiki-  style 

concept.