Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," was a nice experiment in the "democratization" of publishing, but it didn't quite work out. Wikipedia is dead. It died the way the pure products of idealism always do, slowly and quietly and largely in secret, through the corrosive process of compromise.
posted by Unknown at 3:31 PM
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Wikipedia's numbers actually make it an anomaly among wikis. Joe Kraus, the co-founder of JotSpot, a provider of wiki software, reckons that most of the millions of wikis already in existence are designed for small, well-defined groups of people. Team members in a company, for instance, might use wikis to collaborate on presentations or project calendars. Wikis are communities, and “communities require trust,” says Mr Kraus. Trust comes most easily when the people involved know one another or are accountable for their contributions. Given that the optimal group size for humans may be less than 150 members (see the article on blogging earlier in this survey), most wikis might be expected to be small.
posted by Unknown at 10:07 AM
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Apr 20th 2006
From The Economist print edition
WHEN people express scepticism about participatory media, they usually have people like Brian Chase in mind. Mr Chase is a 38-year-old from Nashville, Tennessee, who until recently worked in the middle-management layers of a courier firm called Rush Delivery and seemed destined to remain entirely unremarkable. For reasons known only to himself, however, Mr Chase last May decided to play a joke, “a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong”, as he would later tell his local newspaper, the Tennessean.
His joke consisted of a hoax entry on Wikipedia.org, a free online encyclopedia that anybody—anybody at all—can edit, simply by clicking on a button that says “edit this page”. Mr Chase posted a biographical article on John Seigenthaler, a distinguished journalist (and former editor of the Tennessean) who in 1961 did a stint as assistant to Robert Kennedy, America's attorney-general at the time. Mr Chase, however, fabricated an entirely different life for Mr Seigenthaler, one that had him living in the Soviet Union, founding a public-relations firm and, most perniciously, suggested that he was implicated in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy.
posted by Unknown at 10:06 AM
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Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006
"Edit this page." Just three little words, but what a miracle they have wrought. Just about every entry on Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia, invites visitors to fiddle. Is the entry incomplete? Add something. Is it wrong? Correct it. Is it biased? Edit away. That such a remarkably open-door policy has resulted in the biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world is a testament to the vision of one man, Jimmy Wales.
Wales, 39, is a former options trader who in 1999 set out to reinvent the encyclopedia for the Internet age—free, up-to-date and available to all. He started the way most encyclopedists start, by commissioning articles from experts and subjecting them to peer review. After 18 months, he had a pitiful 12 entries; at that rate, it would take a few millenniums to equal Encyclopaedia Britannica. So Wales created a free-form companion site based on a little-known software program called a wiki (the Hawaiian term means quick) that makes it easy—with the "edit this page" button—to enter and track changes to Web pages. The effect was explosive. That simple button turned readers into contributors and contributors into evangelists. Wikipedia now has more than a million articles in English, nearly 10 times as many as in Britannica. That number nearly doubles each year. And most extraordinarily, the site has not been defaced by vandals or hijacked by zealots. Or more precisely, it is vandalized every day but is usually repaired within minutes by any one of the millions of users who are motivated to protect and nurture the site.
Today Wales is celebrated as a champion of Internet-enabled egalitarianism. He describes himself not as antielitist but as "anticredentialist." That's a key distinction. It means that amateurs can have as much to contribute as professionals and that talent can be found anywhere. Everyone predicted that mob rule would lead to chaos.
Instead it has led to what may prove to be the most powerful industrial model of the 21st century: peer production. Wikipedia is proof that it works, and Jimmy Wales is its prophet.
posted by Unknown at 9:35 AM
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