Once a novelty and now a rather pedestrian online encyclopedia, Wikipedia triggered its news avalanche when someone rewrote the entry about Sarah Palin shortly before she joined McCain’s presidential bid. The Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR), however, doesn’t anticipate that much controversy when it creates Wikipedia entries for the area’s neighborhoods.

CAAR President Judy Savage says the association hopes to “demonstrate the power of Web 2.0” and to give real estate consumers more—and ideally more objective—information to better evaluate “the biggest purchase in their life.” She finds current resources like blogs and sales sites do not focus on the neighborhood level or have motives other than neutrally informing the consumer. Thus, CAAR sees a need for “factual, historical references” that Wikipedia and its readers could fill.

Savage emphasizes the project is still taking shape, but the basic concept is that CAAR would begin a Wikipedia entry with some information about a neighborhood and expect “homeowner associations, people who live or used to live in the neighborhood, realtors, and other locals to contribute.” CAAR would pilot the idea initially with about 10 neighborhoods. “If you were planning on buying a home in a neighborhood, you would probably appreciate reading about it.”

Meanwhile, Savage affirms, “CAAR has no plans to exert any editorial control of these sites.” CAAR starts them; after that, internet users take over. “The beauty of wikis and Web 2.0,” Savage explains, “is that it is self-policing. That is scary, but if you look at the success of Wikipedia, you will understand incorrect information is not allowed to stay around very long. This is not a blog and is not the proper environment for negative posts, spam, or opinions.”

Jim Duncan, “speaking purely as a realtor and blogger,” lauds CAAR for “stepping into Web 2.0.” Yet despite considering himself “really quite indifferent to the whole matter,” he can imagine two problems. First, placing editorial power in the hands of readers, sometimes called crowdsourcing, does not entirely eliminate the possibility that “realtors could go on Wikipedia solely as a venue to advertise themselves.” If nobody revises a glowing self-report, it remains for others to find.

Second, and probably the larger obstacle, is the benefit of creating Wikipedia entries at all. “I don’t see the value in it,” Duncan says. “Plenty of good resources are already out there. I think that if neighborhoods want to do their own wikis, they’re more than welcome to do them themselves.” Without anyone specifically dedicated to keeping CAAR’s entries rolling, those entries may languish unused.

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