Stanford Business

FEBRUARY 2007


Students Author Wiki Wisdom

Weni widi wiki. A new student website came, saw, and is threatening to conquer traditional MBA student communications.

A wiki—according to Wikipedia, which ought to know—is a collaborative website in which participants are free to add and edit content. GSBwiki, which promises to be “the unofficial helpful little guide to all things GSB,” launched last summer. Here MBA students share tips on academics: “Exempt as much of the core as you possibly can. Every quarter.” Time management: “The spicy hot chocolate at Coupa Café has just the right amount of caffeine to keep you studying three more hours, but not so much that you can’t sleep after that.” And the Big Picture: “Relax. You’ll do fine.” Thinking about a 10-day trip? Ask your elders, dude. “Guatemala ... very touristy, but not as bad as Costa Rica.” Better “Rarotonga in the Cook Islands ... very remote and relatively inexpensive.”

As wiki wisdom grows, here’s a GSBwiki caveat that has as much to do with wiki as with old-fashioned dorm scuttlebutt : “Don’t feel pressure to do something because it’s ‘tradition’ or ‘how it works here.’ All that usually means is that’s how the second-years experienced it last year.”