SocialText's Ross Mayfield quotes SAP's Shai Agassi today in a private Q&A where the enterprise vendor's giant Software Developer Network is discussed.  Agassi says the online community gets 500,000 visitors per month, represents an "aggregation of knowledge that is second to none," and is like the slashdot of the sprawling SAP world.  Agassi says vendors in India are sending scores of new employees to spend their first three months on the site to learn.  Average time for a question to be answered is 30 minutes, the company is only creating 20% of the content and there's a reputation system for participants.  That's hot.

Mayfield points out that this system is just for software developers and Socialtext is creating an expanded wiki to serve the entire SAP user community.  Imagine if other communities of practice and interest could harness this model.  The challenge, I imagine, will be to get less technical folks over the learning hump.

 I think stories like this can be added to the list of answers to the argument that social networking sites aren't educational and should be blocked from schools.  That's not a stretch, is it?