For those interested a discussion/potential flame war has just a started up. My entry in the talk page is set out below and is largely self-explanatory. I intervened to reduce what seemed to be excessive references to Malhorta. Historically the Brint Institute of which he is Founding Chairman and Chief Knowledge Architect has been a useful source of material. It is in a different class from the Certifiers such as KMPro, so it would be a pity to see its Founding Chairman adopt the promotional techniques used by those organisations.
t's been an interesting task taking on an active editorial role here. There is an awful amount of self promotion and I sometimes wonder if it is worth the energy. Some of it is blatant in this case I think it just mistaken but let us see how it develops.
Exchanges with Malhotra
Yesterday I took two actions. One was to remove an anonymous addition to "schools of thought" referencing work by Malhotra. The second was to reduce the number of citations of articles by Malhotra to one in order to get some form of balance. Whatever the quality of Malhotra's work it does not deserve that degree of prominence over Nonaka, Prusak etc etc. Personally I have been restrictive in respect of my own articles and I think it would make sense to set a limit of two, possibly three as a rule?
The issue on schools of thought is more substantial. There are several bodies which offer an approach to KM, some academic, some not. These have various degrees of validity and there is a space on the site for them. Schools in this sense indicates a theoretical base or positioning - so complexity, intellectual capital etc count. This is a weak section and needs expansion and citation. We can discuss that here. However to include something with the phrase "the research of Malhotra has helped companies to understand why knowledge management systems fail" is clearly self-promotional.
Malhotra has over reacted to this (and I would be interested to know if he was aware of the anonymous additions). What matters here is balance and objectivity not self-promotion or using the space as a source of all one's published work.
Can we please discuss here and agree some principles for this that we can reference thereafter. Pending that I suggest we do not get into a reversal battle. If Malhotra wants to add two more articles I promise not to reverse that.--Snowded 00:29, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
Comments (1)
Personally I think the Wikipedia community could benefit from elevating trusted members of the community with good track records of contributing effectively through posting to the role of 'editors', with guidelines for editorial policy and conduct. It would help reduce these sorts of conflicts or abuses, and provide some guidelines for arbitrating or resolving them if they occur.
As it stands however, it is very egalitarian - anyone can edit anything in any way, which could add greatly to the article, or diminish it considerably. Quality therefore varies considerably across articles.
In the case of Knowledge Management, where there is no monolithic clearly defined set of agreed approaches and methodologies for the area of practice but instead a wide range of schools of thought, perhaps the problem is potentially more acute.
Posted by Lauchlan Mackinnon | November 5, 2007 3:30 AM
Posted on November 5, 2007 03:30