·:[ Sound and Fury ]:·
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It was bound to happen.

Wikipedia has become the establishment. Like Google, Wikipedia started small — the bastion of geeks. Now, everyone uses it. College students reference it. Bloggers link to it to define terms. With 1000s of edits a day and over a million English-language pages, Alexa consistently ranks Wikipedia in the top 20 visited sites.

But the real harbinger of establishment-ness has only just emerged. The Uncyclopedia is seriously devoted to fun. Based on the same software as its target, the un’pedia claims to be content-free. Jokes, rumors, baseless theories all find a home here.

They also seem to be testing out some of the new features that the ‘pedia wants to implement, such as verification. Good luck to them. As hard as it is to see someone spoofing the venerable Wikipedia, it was bound to happen.

When the idea that people can’t collaborate if they haven’t ever seen each other is discussed seriously rather than met with laughter, then we have a problem.

The United States military makes a great deal about Network Centricity - the ability to fight and win with a networked force. A young Air Force Major, Dan Ward, describes his recent experience at a Net Centric workshop. Apparently, at 30, he’s already too old. He describes the Generation Net, the current crop of recruits, the bloggers, IMers, MySpacers, who have many friends they never seen in person. This generation built Wikipedia without ever knowing what their fellow builders look like or even if they are male or female.

His point is a valid one. Netcentricity requires not just intelligence or a comfort-level with technology. It requires an visceral understanding of how to discover people and build relationships online.

Simply building and deploying a social software system isn’t enough to guarentee success. Despite what Kevin Costner has been told, in reality, If you build it, they may not come. Ross Mayfield, of Social Text, and Suw Charman have proposed a reasonable strategy for software adoption over at Many-to-Many.

Both bottom-up and top-down approaches are described. My experience has been that without leadership support a system is doomed. Mainly because the leadership controls the funding and will only fund what they know to be valuable.