Ignore all the rules

"Ignore all rules."

"If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it."

This is what it says on the English Wikipedia site. Two lines with a fundamental paradox: if you are already ignoring all rules, how can you then identify and ignore specific ones? Let's leave philosophical questions like this aside and compare this entry with the German equivalent.

This entry is one and a half pages long but with the same message.

I'm most grateful to my students at the Universität der Künste in Berlin for pointing this out to me in their analysis of intercultural features of internet encyclopedias.

It's hard to interpret this sort of thing using the classic cultural dimensions. I'm not sure whether this comes from greater individualism in the English-speaking world (i.e. anything goes) or a German preference for "low-context" or explicit communication combined with high uncertainty avoidance.

By the way, Die Zeit did an interesting interview with historian Peter Haber on a similar topic the other day (8 July 2010).

Whatever the explanation, it seems to me that effective management of cultural aspects of global knowledge sharing is becoming an increasingly important challenge. I'm interested in the cultural implications of managing social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn and particularly in ensuring that all cultures can participate in global learning platforms.

If you have any ideas on this, I'd love to hear from you.