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May 06, 2005
Web : In Praise of Wikipedia
I am a moderate believer in the Open Source movement. I believe strongly that having many minds generating ideas and many eyes checking for errors has very real benefit. On the other hand, I also believe that there is also value for consistency of vision and style in many endeavors which moderates (but may not eliminate) the net benefit of many minds/eyes. The result is that, in my opinion, the value of Open Source depends a lot on the project in question.
As it turns out, writing an encyclopedia is one of those projects for which Open Source is so ideally suited that the results are astounding. What you want for an encyclopedia is the largest possible collection of experts you can get on a diverse variety of subjects, with as many people as you can get fact-checking the results. What you get when you apply the Open Source philosophy to this problem is the Wikipedia.
I have found the Wikipedia so useful that I doubt I will ever use another encyclopedia again. After all, why would I use the Encyclopedia Britannica with 120,000 entries written by 4000 contributors when I could look at the which has 550,000 entries written by over 13,000 regular contributors (and many times that number of single-article editors). I have yet to look something up and not find what I was looking for (and some of my queries are fairly obscure).
If you have never looked at the Wikipedia, I would strongly suggest giving it a try.
Posted by Steven at May 6, 2005 11:29 AM
