Spreading Knowledge, The Wiki Way

Blake writes “Spreading Knowledge, The Wiki Way (washingtonpost.com) Wikipedia’s success is particularly remarkable because unlike regular Web sites, it is created entirely by the people who visit it. With more than 340,000 English-language articles, this community-edited encyclopedia is already considerably larger than its leading rival, the Encyclopedia Britannica, which offers 75,000 articles online in a subscription service.”

September 13, 2004 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. thesaint says:
    September 13, 2004 at 7:51 pm

    Worst of Both Worlds
    Wikipedia wants to be a community? Let them blog. The want to be an encyclopedia? Sorry, I’ll take an “expensive” authoritative version any day.

    Reply
  2. Daniel says:
    September 14, 2004 at 3:51 am

    Re:Worst of Both Worlds
    I’ve got to agree with thesaint considering how the wikipedia is currently organized. However, it’s my belief that an open source encyclopedia is not inheirently crazy. If only named people, preferably with affiliation, contributed, and if contributers were required to cite established print sources, it could work. Have a look at the Encyclopedia Mythica at http://www.pantheon.org. For every article, there is a “used sources” button. Clicking that gives you one more books with author, title, publisher, pub year and ISBN. You can then make informed guesses as to authority.

    Still, I think the traditional encyclopedia model has a lot going for it. I’m not so sure a bunch of anonymous people posting what they feel like it does.

    Reply

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