While many are familiar with the concept of wikis from Wikipedia (“the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”), they’re gaining more widespread use in a variety of online applications.
eWeek reports that HealthNex, an IBM sponsored blog, is spearheading a push to kickstart Clinfowiki, a project dedicated to collecting useful information about clinical informatics. That topic might be obscure to most – it’s “the study of information systems (computers and programs) used in the clinical practice of medicine,” says Clinicalinformatics.com – but it’s the kind of info that’s indispensible to healthcare ITs. HealthNex is in the midst of a three day blitz (dubbed “Blogposium”) to cooperatively generate new articles for ClinfoWiki across more than a dozen healthcare blogs. Hopefully, healthcare professionals and confounded laypersons alike will soon have Clinfowiki articles on biobanking and CPOE (computerized physician order entry) at their fingertips.
But since medicine is tough, let’s go shopping. ClickZ says that ShopWiki, a comparison shopping aggregator founded by a pair of former DoubleClick executives, is wading bravely into a pretty crowded pool. Hoping to set themselves apart from bigger, more established shopping verticals, ShopWiki invites users to create and collectively edit gift guides and buying guides for various kinds of products. It encourages customers to write product reviews, and excerpts a number of them from outside sites.
Rather than thriving on feeds delivered by merchants, the ad-supported ShopWiki crawls over 120,000 sites on its own. While that isn’t exactly a recipe for making merchants happy, ShopWiki hopes to stave off potential complaints by pointing out that it sells no products on its own, always sending consumers directly to sellers’ sites to make purchases. A bigger puzzle might be trying to keep out product PR machines or other parties interested in slanting the buying guides, which are supposed to have no point of view. ShopWiki promises prompt removal of of such material, but if they manage to get popular, the problem is only going to get worse (as Wikipedia has learned).
