[wordup] populist editing (wiki!)

[Adam Shand]

Wiki's are a pet love of mine, I happen to think they are one of the
coolest things on the internet, though they do take some getting used
to.  I run a wiki for the community wireless network I founded a year
ago called Personal Telco, and there are several other very cool ones
around.

You have to give them a chance though, they aren't great eye candy but
the concept of being able to edit any page just by clicking "edit" is
pretty addictive and fascinating.

 Personal Telco: 
    http://www.personaltelco.net/
 Portland Pattern Repository (The Original, and largest, Wiki):
    http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors
 MeatBall:
    http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl

Adam.

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/magazine/09POPULIST.html

Populist Editing
By STEVEN JOHNSON

Despite the popular conception of the Internet as our most interactive
medium, on the great majority of Web pages the interaction all goes in
one direction. But an intriguing new subgenre of sites, called
WikiWikiWebs, really are interactive: users can both read and write. If
you don’t like the perspective of the article you are perusing, you can
go in and rephrase the concluding paragraph. If you stumble across a
spelling mistake, you can fix it with a few quick keystrokes. Wikis are
like communal gardens of data: some participants do a lot of heavy
planting, while others prefer to pull a weed here and there.

The most ambitious Wiki project to date applies this governing principle
to the encyclopedia, that Enlightenment-era icon of human intelligence.
The result is the Wikipedia, created in early 2001 by a philosophy Ph.D.
named Larry Sanger and billed as ‘‘a collaborative project to produce a
complete encyclopedia from scratch.’’ Wikipedia has attracted more than
1,000 new entries a month on everything from astronomy to the visual
arts. With a total of 16,000 articles in the database, the Wikipedia is
already large enough to be a source of generally reliable information,
though stronger in some areas (‘‘Star Trek’’ spinoffs) than others (the
novels of Charles Dickens).

Wikipedia differs from conventional encyclopedias in that each article
is a work in progress: a visitor will draft a new entry, sometimes
merely jotting down a few random data points, with a handful of links to
other related entries; a few weeks later, another visitor might add a
paragraph or two or a few more hyperlinks. Each entry has a revision
history, like those featured in modern word processors, that lets you
see at a glance any changes that have been made to the document.

What prevents a crank or a saboteur from deliberately undermining the
quality of entries? Only the steady force of constant revisions, doled
out by thousands of contributors. A few jokers in the mix will
invariably get washed out by the overwhelming number of contributors who
are genuinely interested in the site’s meeting its objectives. There is
a saying in the open-source software community (from which the Wiki
movement borrows more than a few moves): given enough eyeballs, all bugs
are shallow. The slogan works for programmers collectively writing an
operating system like Linux, so why shouldn’t it work for hobbyists and
armchair enthusiasts stringing together an encyclopedia?