Sun 15 Jan 2006
I have seen the world and I am here to tell you, it is wiki. A wiki is a web application that allows a large number of individals to collaborate on a project or website. It has been used for so many things, from collaborative blogs to creating statistics. The word wiki comes from the Hawaiian. It means quick, fast or ‘to hurry up’.
The Wikipedia is the most mainstream version of what the wiki can do. It is an online encyclopedia created by interested members. It is fascinating in its scope and amazingly interlinked. With almost one million articles in the system, the hotlinks and related entries keep me surfing for hours.
Despite the fascinating articles and links, one of the most fascinating aspects of the site is how it is made. Individuals slowly create articles over time adding to and revising content. Any individual bias is located and corrected simply by the fact that such a large number of people are involved and can remove any comments that could be seen as unscientific. It is the law of large numbers: no one agenda can spoil the validity of an article. (On the other hand, no one article can be a prize-winning piece of writing).
With each article, the reader can view the behind the scenes discussion that led to the currrent version of the article. You would never guess while reading an article on “Manifest Destiny” but the article was written by argumentative, opinionated people that can not even behave civilly to each other and yet they seem to come together to create content that could be in the Britannica. It is like being in the worst West End Strata meeting you can imagine.
I am hooked. I can imagine such strength in this application in the future. Perhaps I too will lend my hand to it.
Hi will
I think wikipedia is great… I was the first editor of the entry on “wheelchair basketball,” however it has (mercifully) been rewritten many times since. I heard a CBC show about it that talked about the difficulty wikipedia is creating for hardbound encyclopedias like britannica - apparently their sales are down %60 since wikipedia turned up. My one criticism is that it seems that plagiarism is rampant. If you look up major entries on google, you’ll find that many people have simply picked content up from other sites and plunked them down in wikipedia.