Wonders of the Internet Part One: Wikipedia
The Wikipedia is a free web-based encyclopedia with content written by an army of volunteers. It's a fabulous resource and gives me hope for humanity. Wired magazine reports:
In 2005, the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.
Wow. This is the modern equivalent to barn raising. Since anyone can contribute, I thought it would be neat to post a new entry just to see how it works. I went to the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga article and noticed that there was no article on a style of yoga I teach, Mysore style. So I wrote one and posted it (with 3 year old twins, this counted as an exciting Friday night for me). There was no need to register, login, enter my email or anything. You just create an entry and post it, almost as if it is your own blog.
Given how easy it is to contribute, it sounds like it's a recipe for anarchy and chaos. On the contrary, it's turning out to be one of the world's most democratic institutions. The group of contributors is self-policing, and even the rules are collaboratively drawn up and amended over time.
Such an open culture is vulnerable to abuse and vandalism. One way they have found to reduce this problem is that you can watch a page and be notified as soon as anyone modifies it, in effect becoming it's guardian. Certain controversial pages (like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entry which has an extensive discussion subpage) get “edited” several times a day sometimes. Its guardians usually act within minutes of any offending corrections.
Both the contents and the inner workings of the Wikipedia are fascinating. Here's a great article in Wired to find out more.