“Talk of the Nation” on NPR
Wikipedia has been hailed as revolutionary, attacked as inaccurate, and held up as a model for Web 2.0 collaboration. The site hosts more than 3 million articles in English, it’s written and edited by hundreds of thousands of volunteers, and it’s the poster child of crowdsourcing.
But Wikipedia’s growth, once exponential, has flattened. In an article for TIME magazine, Farhad Manjoo writes about how volunteer editors are slower to create new entries and correct errors on existing articles.
“[Wikipedia] remains a precious resource,” Manjoo writes. “Still, Wikipedia’s troubles suggest the limits of Web 2.0 — that when an idealized community gets too big, it starts becoming dysfunctional. Just like every other human organization.”
Recent Comments