I’m always glad to see another Jon Udell post come up in my RSS feeds, though some of them are beyond me. Today’s Wikipedia and the social construction of knowledge is an especially graceful bit of teaching, reminding us that Wikipedia’s “radical transparency” is really a better mousetrap:

Some knowledge is purely factual, but much is socially constructed and therefore inevitably prone to bias and dispute. Wikipedia’s greatest innovation is arguably the framework it provides to mediate the social construction of knowledge, advocate for neutrality, accommodate dispute, and offer a path to its negotiated resolution.

Udell also points us to a list of disputed topics and a list of previously controversial issues. I’d love to see (and so I suppose should make myself…) a screencast of the podcast revision contretemps, but beyond the soap opera dimensions of that food fight lurk some really interesting ideas about the uses of the wiki medium.
Addendum: waxy.org prods the clever to automate: “I’d love to see a tool for animating Wikipedia history for a given entry or block of text…”