Page:E-government 2.0 - Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.pdf/26

 Eventually GPO sitemapped their site and then you could at least find it through GPO. But that is just one example. You know there are people that are searching for this in a way that, where they hear on the news that there is a comment period on whether the polar bear should be endangered species and they want to comment. They go to search on Google, they do not get the result that they expect.

Regulations.gov shows that concern very acutely.

I want to follow a little bit on Mr. Wales comments and Ms. Evans comments about Regulations.gov. We were hoping by this point that we could be at the point where we were trying out new technologies for regulations and public comment periods.

Chairman. What were you thinking of?

Mr. . I mean, using the wiki model. A lot of people would think of it as, oh you just put up a rule and then people go and attack it and you get both sides. But the really interesting thing about what happens on Wikipedia is the commentary pages and the notes pages, which are much more similar to a traditional rulemaking than you would think.

If you go through and look through how they go about making determinations and people giving justifications based on facts and what the rules are for how that is done, I think we could learn a lot from just trying out new technologies. Not saying that it should supplant the old ways of rulemaking. But perhaps we can, in certain kinds of rulemakings, we can come up with a more collaborative discussion rather than the traditional conflict policy that kind of governs public comment periods today.

Chairman. That is very interesting.

You know there is another institution around Washington that needs more collaboration to be effective, Congress. Maybe we should all form a Congressipedia.

Another thing we do not do here, if I may continue this particular flight, gaining now with the welcoming our colleague from Hawaii. You told us the word wiki is Hawaiian for quickly, that one thing that we do not do enough around here is to legislate wikily. So anyway, I welcome Senator Akaka.

I am going to ask one more series of questions and then I am going to yield to you, Senator Akaka. Thanks for being here.

I want to go directly to you, Mr. Wales, and thank you again for being here, to take up one of the—I guess it is a criticism, a skepticism about Wikipedia, which is that inaccurate content can result when larger numbers of participants outweigh the contribution of a few experts.

In your testimony, you said that controls or kind of management devices can be put in to provide—I like the term—fine grain control to access and edit information. And I wanted to ask you to elaborate on that, particularly, but generally with regard to Wikipedia but also as it may effect collaborative technologies to be used by the Federal Government.

Mr. . Absolutely. So within Wikipedia, the software, the Mediawiki software that we use puts several tools into the hands of the community so that they can manage the quality of the content. Within the community, there are administrators who are elected from the community and they are generally chosen after